LONDON (Bywire News) - In the early hours of Thursday, many Solana users began complaining of their wallets being drained which spiked urgent interest from a range of Solana native projects to identify what has occurred.
Reports state that attackers were moving funds from Solana wallets. In total, an estimated 7,767 Solana wallets have been affected as confirmed by Solana Foundation.
Solana Foundation tweeted the following as they confirmed the incident “Engineers from multiple ecosystems, with the help of several security firms, are investigating drained wallets on Solana. There is no evidence hardware wallets are impacted.”
Hackers targeted Phantom and Slope wallet users as both teams confirmed with statements that they were investigating the incident. Phantom noted that “the team does not believe this is a Phantom-specific issue.”
The Largest NFT marketplace on Solana, MagicEden also added that they were of the belief that they were looking into “a widespread SOL exploit” while urging users to revoke any wallet permissions.
The Solana Foundation claimed that the hardware wallets seem to be unaffected. However, the information shared by Solana Labs communications leads Austin Federa added that “a potential supply chain attack could be responsible. He also speculated that many wallets could share some software dependency as the hackers had access to wallets without spoofing users into giving away their funds. Federa added that the attack doesn’t seem to be likely to be protocol level.
Solana Labs co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko commented on the incident urging users to come forward with any relevant information. “Looking for folks who were affected by the attack, but only received sol or tokens into the wallet and never transacted more than once, never reused their mnemonic key anywhere else,” he said as the Solana Foundation also prompted affected users to fill a survey to assist engineers in their investigations.
The exact amount of the stolen funds is still unknown. However, due to the total number of users affected, estimates put the figure in the range of millions of dollars.
Solana’s native token $SOL also suffered a 4.4% drop trading at around $38.55 at the time of writing.
(Writing by Samba Jallow, editing by Tom Cropper and Klaudia Fior)