We've all heard- Solona is in trouble again; this time not due to blockchain outages; the chain is still up and running.
SOL first began being drained from wallets Tuesday afternoon, 8/2/22. This was the beginning of an ensuing chaotic 24 hour "supply chain attack" as Anatoly Yakovenko described it; in which at least $5m worth of liquidity in Solona, USDC, and SLP were drained from over 8,000 wallets on the Solona blockchain. The exact amount value which was heisted in the last day is hard to gauge at this early phase; information relies mainly on user reports at point.
Solona degens would like to point out that the network's security has not been "hacked" or even compromised; Solona devs have narrowed the affected majority to Slope Finance wallet users, particularly the keys that were operating on the iOs platform. Although some Phantom wallet holders were affected, many of Phantom wallets that were drained had their keys imported through Slope Finance. Apparently, the faulty source code in the Slope Finance Wallet was able to be exploited to capture the cached JSON private key file which is stored on the phone.
Whitehat hackers were actually able to trace the source of the attacking IP address to Moldova, a small country in Eastern Europe that borders Romania; the way they did this was genius. Self hosting NFTs were sent to the attacker's wallets; when the hackers opened the NFTs, some Trojan horse code was able to glean information about the IP and browser.
Pretty cool. But what does this mean for Solona? This is the fourth fail THIS YEAR. SOL is currently trading hands at $39.31, down from the low $40s range before the attack. For FUDDERS, this is more ammo. I'll be honest, I dumped my bag of SOL earlier this year and am still debating on getting back in. But consider this...
All of our best Emergency Medical Technology that is used for civilian care in the United States is developed during war time overseas; the reason being is that the violence of war offers a lot more pressing opportunities to perform new, effective, and outside of the box techniques to save lives.
This is how we can look at the Solona troubles- their project has experienced some big road bumps. However, if they can learn and create better security all around while in the trenches of war, they just may come out ahead other big name blockchains.
Thanks for reading, and thank you to Dennis Layden for filling me in on this situation thtrough his newsletter and Twitter Space, and for his dedication in staying up all night in Spaces with Anatoloy and other Solona whitehats. Follow him here on Twitter.
