🤮 Another day, another hack

gm frens 🤬

Just when you thought market going down is bad enough, you read about those hacks almost on daily basis. SOL and USCD was the target this time. Roughly $5 million worth of crypto stolen in this hack. More than 15k wallets were impacted.

So what is going on?

There is a plenty of wallet types out there in the crypto world. Every blockchain might have their own wallet. Metamask and Coinbase are among the most popular ones for Ethereum blockchain. For Solana blockchain, among the most popular wallets are Phantom and Slope.

Those two wallets, Phantom and Slope are the ones which seem to be impacted by this hack. No one know exactly how it happened. Users were getting notifications that they were sending tokens to an unknown address without engaging with any website, despite being disconnected from web browsers or initiating any transfers.

According to Coindesk, this was mainly impacting mobile wallet users where the attacker was able to initiate and approve transactions on behalf of the wallet owners. As per Solana Status tweet, they are investigating the issue with the drained wallets and also mentioned that there is no evidence that hardware wallets were impacted by the same attack.

Magic Eden, which is the biggest NFT marketplace for Solana, posted a tweet suggesting that users disconnect their phantom wallet.

Magic Ethen 🪄 @MagicEden

🚨🚨🚨There seems to be a widespread SOL exploit at play that's draining wallets throughout the ecosystem Here's what you can do right now to best protect yourself 1. Go to >Settings on your @phantom wallet 2. >Trusted Apps 3. >Revoke Permissions for any suspicious links 💜

Someone posted a tweet saying that something similar happened on both of his wallets, Slope wallet and Trust wallet which might be related to the same attacked but no confirmations on this yet.

Justin.sol @JustinBarlow

For reference I haven't interacted with any contracts at all in ~40 days. My ERC-20 and SPL USDC held on both @slope_finance and @TrustWallet were drained

There is this Solscan Dashboard created for this hack where you will be able to track all the activity that happened during this attack.

Click on the image to see the dashboard.

This brings us to a really important topic we should talk about

We have seen so many hacks lately. Hacks in exchanges, hacks in bridge networks, now hacks in hot wallets.. Is this space really safe or we all risk getting hacked?!

Well, what if I tell you that there is a way to be safe from those hacks?!

BUY YOURSELF A HARDWARE WALLET!!

If you use a web browser wallet, that is considered as a “hot” wallet. Hardware wallet known also as “cold” wallet is a wallet which stores user’s private keys in a secure hardware device. The benefit is that those keys will remain unexposed (while in the case of hot wallets you risk getting exposed when typing it in a browser), there is no way for viruses to track your private keys and you can hold multiple cryptocurrencies/nfts in the same cold wallet.

There is a plenty of hardware wallets out there, with Ledger and Trezor among the most widely used ones. You can just type hardware wallets in Google and you’ll see which ones are the most popular and widely used.

Don’t be cheap. Don’t you think you will not be a victim or you know how to stay safe. Wallet drains are happening without having any interaction to a specific website or anything like that. You can get hacked just for storing your private keys in a hot wallet. You are a degen who spends thousands to buy JPEGs and yet you think a $150 hardware wallet is expensive. BRUUUUUH…

Stay safe everyone.