Cypher Protocol Pirate: Smart Contract Frozen After Estimated $1 Million Loss
Cypher Protocol, a Solana-based decentralized futures exchange, froze its smart contracts after being hit by a costly attack, with losses estimated at around $1 million.
On August 7, Cypher notified its 13,500 followers on X (formerly known as Twitter) that they had experienced a security incident and therefore froze their smart contracts.
The team added that they are investigating the cause of the infiltration and have attempted to contact the hackers to negotiate the return of the stolen funds.
According to data from Solana blockchain explorer Solscan, wallets suspected of being linked to the exploit stole approximately 38,530 Solana tokens and $123,184 USD Coin—resulting in a total of $1,035,203 in illegally obtained funds.
Incidents and Actions
Within hours of the attack occurring, the alleged wallet transferred 30,000 USDC to Binance's Solana USDC address "kiing.sol" in a possible attempt to cash out the stolen funds.
Since the attack, a number of NFTs were sent to wallets containing refund request messages.
Apart from that, hackers are also suspected of not having bridged Solana-based funds to the Ethereum network.
Context and Impact
The attack occurred in the middle of the hacker house mtnDAO Cypher Protocol event, which it co-hosted with another Solana protocol, Marginfi. Marginfi wrote on his Telegram that they remain independent of Cypher and unaffected by the attack.
Cypher Protocol's response and follow-up regarding this incident will be interesting to follow. In a crypto ecosystem that operates on trust and transparency, how a company responds to an incident like this can have a significant impact.
Source: Cointelegraph