Solana Hacked, Many Down BAD

What Happened

As of 10PM EST on August 2nd, over 7,000 Solana wallets had been effected and drained of their cryptocurrency and assets. Those wallets can be found here (Thank you Dune for the list). This is a hack of unprecedented financial impact. We will start by going over what we know, and then we can speculate about the implications this has for the web3 natives and growth in this space.

To start, there was over $8 MILLION dollars drained within the first 4 hours of the hack. It started with a handful of people noticing that their Solana balances were zero when they go to check their wallet. It should be noted that it only appears warm and hot wallets were effected, not cold wallets (with a hardware component). NFT assets seemed to be safe but the crypto was gone. As the masses flocked to Twitter, it became apparent that this was widespread.

Most of the official and speedy reports came from Slope Finance, Phantom, and Magic Eden. Right away experts chimed in stating there was only one way for this to be happening in the fashion it did, an auto approval. This means a supply chain issue is the most likely cause of thousands of seed phrases and private keys getting leaked. There was nothing that anyone could have done and the source of the leak is still being investigated.

How to Protect Yourself

Whether you were one of the unfortunate ones this time or not, it's imperative that as a space we band together and ensure we do everything we can to stay safe moving forward.

1. Revoke connections and access to any of your existing browser/software wallets. Every wallet has a way to do it through the setting, look through your wallets help guides if you find yourself lost or take to twitter!
2. Get AND USE a hardware waller such as a Ledger. This will ensure that no transactions can happen with your wallets unless you physically approve them.
3. Share information with other. Let people know if you see something weird or have experience a hack. It will help to organize this information so we can figure out safeguards for the future.

The NFT and Crypto communities have been extremely receptive in helping those with questions. If you are unsure about cyber security, I'd highly reccomend searching out some experts on Twitter to help educate you further. Just ask questions!

Moving Forward

Unfortunately, with a horrible incident like this, there can be negative connotations that get associated with the Crypto space as a whole. People already see NFTs and alot of Cyrpto as "Scams" or "Ponzi Schemes" so when a massive $7 Million dollar hack happens, it reinforces that sentiment.

On the bright side, this provides us an opportunity to learn from our weakness' and push security harder as the space grows in it's infancy. While this breach may seem catastrophic right now (and there are a ton of people who are wiped), it could be alot worse with a larger crypto crowd in the future. So learning these mistakes now is very valuable.