The users of Solana were surprised on Tuesday night to find that their hot wallets had been drained of SOL, USDC stablecoin, and other Solana-based tokens in what is known as a "supply chain attack."
The Solana blockchain network suffered a huge setback this week when it came to light that over 8,000 wallets were compromised and millions in coins laundered away.
An unknown group of hackers robbed thousands from Solana's wallets.
News broke late Tuesday night that 8,000 wallets had been hacked due to a widespread exploit. Although the full extent of this attack is still unknown, Solana revealed some crucial information about it; they found out that the attackers targeted Phantom, Slope, and TrustWallet users.
Some people have speculated that this may be due to permissions previously given by users to smart contracts and other platforms.
A recent Magic Eden NFT marketplace alert reported that users should revoke permissions for suspicious links. However, this didn't help as transactions were being signed legitimately, indicating that users' private keys had been compromised.
It has been found that the exploit was not caused by a bug in Solana's core code but rather due to vulnerabilities present within several wallets used throughout the Solana ecosystems.
The co-founder and CEO of Solana Labs, Anatoly Yakovenko, confirmed that both iOS and Android users were victims of the recent supply chain attack. He also asked those affected by this issue to come forward with any information they knew.
The general crypto community told Solana users that they should transfer their funds into centralized exchanges or cold storage.
The Solana Foundation is looking into the cause of this week's attack and has created an online survey for those who lost funds during it. This will help engineers find out more about what went wrong so they can work towards fixing things.
The Solana wallet hack has drawn criticism from the investor community. Some industry observers on Twitter suggested shorting SOL cryptocurrency in response to this event. Solana has suffered several network outages in the last few months, tarnishing its appeal as an Ethereum killer.
The value of SOL immediately fell by 7% after the company announced that its network had been hacked. The coin has seen a slight loss reduction over the past 24 hours, with just a 3.28% drop.
The damage to the network's reputation is already ugly, but this attack will worsen it.
Disclaimer: The author's comments and recommendations are solely for educational and informative purposes. They do not represent any financial or investment advice. Always DYOR (do your own research)