On August 18th, Cypher Protocol, a decentralized futures trading platform built on Solana, shared some positive news on X(Twitter). They successfully managed to freeze more than half of the stolen cryptocurrency from various centralized exchanges, amounting to around $600,000. They received assistance from independent blockchain investigators.
The incident began on August 7th when Cypher became a target of a hacker group. This group attacked and stole approximately $1 million worth of cryptocurrencies. As a result, Cypher had to temporarily halt its smart contract transactions on its platform.
Security experts from Hallorn, a blockchain security company, explained that Cypher allowed borrowing and lending through main and sub-accounts. However, there was a vulnerability that prevented proper monitoring of isolated sub-accounts, and there were inadequate checks in place before lending.
The attacker exploited this vulnerability by using multiple accounts to withdraw around $1 million worth of various cryptocurrencies like USDT, SOL, wETH, and other altcoins.
On August 10th, Cypher reached out to the hacker group and proposed a 10% reward, roughly valued at $120,000, for those who helped them recover the lost funds. However, two days later, the hackers did not adhere to the agreement and instead disclosed their personal information.
On August 16th, Cypher announced a plan to repurchase and distribute the remaining assets to the affected users. They would do this by distributing the assets based on ownership ratios.
Lastly, Cypher expressed gratitude to blockchain expert ZachXBT for helping them freeze funds on multiple exchanges and for assisting in tracking the hackers.
It’s worth noting that during August 2023, Cypher wasn’t the only victim. Two other significant attacks occurred: Zunami, a DeFi protocol, was attacked, resulting in a loss of around $2.1 million on August 13th, and Steadefi, a yield aggregator platform, was exploited for approximately $1.1 million on August 7th.