Solana Says Blame It On Slope

The developers of the Solana (SOL) blockchain have identified the closed-source Slope wallet as the cause of a large attack that compromised more than 8,000 digital wallets and led to the theft of more than USD 8 million worth of cash.

The official Solana Status Twitter account made the following statement: “After an investigation by developers, ecosystem teams, and security auditors, it appears that impacted addresses were at one point created, imported, or utilized in Slope mobile wallet programs,” the tweet read.

In an official statement, Slope did not confirm nor deny the accusation.

Instead, the company stated that “nothing is yet concrete” and that they are now working with “various possibilities as to the nature of the breach.”

The Slope team has asked users to generate a new seed phrase wallet with a seed phrase that is completely unique to them and to transfer all of their assets to this new wallet. They have stated that they are actively conducting internal investigations and audits and are working with top external security and audit groups.

Slope is a non-custodial, web-based cryptocurrency wallet and browser plugin that let users to manage assets on the Solana blockchain. Slope does not store users’ private keys.

According to the reports, a Solana attack that has been continuing and has affected more than 8,000 wallets has caused users to lose millions of dollars worth of cash. According to the dashboard that was made available by the scanning tool for the Solana ecosystem, Solscan, as of 7:30 UTC on Thursday morning, a total of USD 8.58m had been transferred to the hacker’s wallets by that point in time. The exact amount of funds that were stolen varied between USD 4.5m and USD 8m worth of funds, depending on the source. However, the amount of funds that were stolen was not disclosed.

The Solana development team has ruled out the notion that the attack was caused by a flaw in the fundamental programming

that runs the blockchain. “This does not appear to be an issue with Solana core programming,” the team noted in their statement. “Rather, it appears to be a bug in software utilized by numerous software wallets that are popular among users of the network.”
In spite of the fact that several Phantom wallets were emptied, the Phantom wallet team, who had earlier reassured users that the Solana attack is not “a Phantom-specific issue,” discovered that the holders of those wallets had previously interacted with a Slope wallet.

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“Phantom has reason to believe that the alleged exploits are due to issues linked to importing accounts to and from Slope,” the Phantom team tweeted. “Phantom has reason to believe that the reported exploits are due to complications related to importing accounts.”

In the meantime, a cryptocurrency developer who tweets under the handle @foobar suggested that the Slope wallet might have stored plaintext seed phrases on their own centralized servers.
Adam Cochran, a veteran of the field of cryptography, was quoted as saying, “My gosh, so Slope was sending plain text private key and seed phrases to a server.” “There is not a single design justification that could ever be considered appropriate for it. I was anticipating a string adding in an erroneous location as a leak, but this is labelled… what the hell is going on?”

Users started claiming that their assets had been taken without their knowledge from key hot wallets

including as Phantom, Slope, and TrustWallet on Tuesday, which is when the global hack is believed to have originated. These hot wallets include TrustWallet, Slope, and Phantom. A number of the individuals who were impacted by this issue stated that they have not engaged with any contracts in more than forty days.

Blockchain security companies were fast to discover that transactions were signed by the actual owners, which suggests that a compromise of some sort occurred with regard to private keys. The breach did not harm physical wallets in any way.

Notably, despite the extensive nature of the hack, Solana’s native token SOL has held up very well. This is a cause for celebration. It was trading at USD 39.32 at 7:30 UTC on Thursday morning, which is an increase of 1.8 percent from the previous day but a decrease of 2.3 percent from the previous week.