The Solana Foundation has revealed that wallet service Slope is largely to blame for the recent security flaw. A hack early this week resulted in the theft of cryptocurrency from thousands of users of the Solana platform. Slope is a service that provides Web3 wallets for the Solana layer-1 (L1) blockchain. The Solana Foundation blamed Slope in a tweet sent out through its Solana Status Twitter account on Wednesday. The security breach was not momentary but dragged on for hours.
At some point on Tuesday, members of the Solana community began claiming their crypto wallets had lost all their SOL and other tokens. Estimates put the theft at around $8 million in cryptocurrency from over 8,000 wallets.
How it went wrong for Solana holders using Slope
The wallet drain went on all night Tuesday and into the early hours of Wednesday. On Wednesday, Solana sent out a tweet indicating that the compromised addresses had one common denominator- they all have been imported or used in Slope’s mobile wallet applications at some point in the past. However, the security of the hardware wallets utilised by Slope has not been compromised. In addition, the statement said there was no proof that the Solana protocol or its cryptography had been exploited.
The Solana Foundation discovered, over the course of its investigation, that the perpetrators of the exploit had gained unauthorised access to the private keys that corresponded to each wallet. It further mentions that the attackers “inadvertently transmitted” the private keys to an “application monitoring service” such as Slope. Slope has also admitted to the issue at hand. The company advised wallet owners to create a new seed phrase and move all of their cash to it, rather than retaining them in the old one.
Some experts have speculated about the possible causes of the breach, despite the lack of specifics. There have been rumours that Slope’s may have kept some seed phrases in its centralised servers. Cryptocurrencies are still reeling from the recent losses they have suffered, and this latest blot on the sector comes at an unfortunate time. SOL is trading at $38.86, marginally above the 7-day low as of this writing