CertiK Co-founder Cautions About Rising Phishing Attacks; Faulty Contract Locks $24M SOL; Silk Road-Era Bitcoin Moved
Summary:
The co-founder of security firm CertiK warns of an alarming rise in phishing attacks in the blockchain sector. Meanwhile, a faulty smart contract locks up $24 million of Lido-staked Solana, and U.S. authorities move Silk Road-era Bitcoin worth $2 billion to a new wallet.
The co-founder of a security company has alerted the crypto community to the rising complexity of phishing attacks, even though the incident rate is declining. A flawed smart contract has immobilized $24 million in Lido-staked Solana. On another note, U.S. officials relocated billions of dollars of Silk Road-era Bitcoin. This comes with the report of heightened phishing attacks characterized by Ronghui Gu, co-founder of CertiK, as being at a "distressing level."
According to Gu, the first quarter of 2024 was ordinarily typical, involving usual cyber breaches and threats. However, the heightened complexity of cyber-attacks, especially private key compromises and phishing ventures is concerning. Higher losses were posted during Q1 2024 due to private key compromises, a remarkable increase from the corresponding period in 2023.
In CertiK’s quarterly cyber review titled Hack3d, the company noted that there were only 26 hacking incidents, but the losses from these incidents amounted to an alarming $239 million. Private key compromise-related losses surged by 1,171%, from an initial $18.8 million during Q1 2023.
$24 million of Lido-staked SOL was stuck due to a defective smart contract. Previously, Lido on Solana provided a generous 5% annual yield on Solana staking, but the service was discontinued in October after it became financially unsustainable due to low user fees. Users had up until February to unstake their Solana through a user-friendly interface which is now defunct, leaving them to deal with a complicating unstaking process via Solana's command line interface (CLI).
Pavel Pavlov, a product manager at P2P Validator, which initially engineered Lido on Solana, disclosed in a Discord message that the problem might be from the smart contract behind the withdrawal function. He suggested that Lido DAO needs to modify the smart contract. This task is complex and time-consuming, hence Lido DAO is finding easier alternatives which don't require modifying the smart contract.
In other news, Bitcoin worth approximately $2 billion, which was seized by the U.S. Department of Justice due to a Silk Road case has been transferred to a new address. Blockchain data from April 2 discloses a DOJ-associated wallet making a 0.001 Bitcoin transaction to a Coinbase Prime address, probably as a preliminary move before relocating the remaining funds. The same wallet then moved 30,174 BTC. On-chain analysis links this fund to James Zhong, an individual convicted for illegally obtaining Bitcoin from the Silk Road marketplace.
In 2021, U.S. officials confiscatedZhong's Bitcoin stash during a raid. In March 2023, the government affirmed they had sold about 9,861 BTC gotten from Zhong. The Silk Road website has been inactive for over a decade. Its creator, Ross Ulbricht, is serving two life terms with no possibility of parole.
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Contributors: Geraint Price, Sam Bourgi, and Felix Ng.
Published At
4/3/2024 4:17:46 PM
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