The recent Solana blockchain hack, for more than $5 million, made headlines in the crypto media. During the hack, some so-called “white hat” hackers joined the fight and helped slow down this attack.
White hats move to limit the damage
It is three attacks on Slope mobile wallet that the pirates managed to steal over $5 million. So they managed to recover many private keys, which gave them access to funds. As we reminded you in our article, this hack would affect almost 5 to 8000 wallets.
During the first hour of the attack many developers gathered to try to get a better understanding of the current attack and how they could limit the damage. One of these developers, SolBlazethe founder of the Solana betting pool proposed an interesting solution to block hackers as much as possible.
The principle is as follows: use script to write lock accounts of the hacker(s), which would allow to slow down their transactions. On the Solana blockchain, any transaction that modifies an account, such as a change in balance, puts a write lock on this account for a short period of time.
Therefore the developer took advantage of this feature. As Michael Hubbard, Founder and Managing Director of Laine, Solana Validator, says:
The developer thought he could always trigger write locks on the hacker’s accounts. Thus it prevents transactions from completing successfully.
Way to go save time and greatly limit the damage the pirate(s). This script is used by many white hats, these ethical hackers who come to the aid of protocols or blockchains that are under attack. So white hat hackers allowed Nomad bridge to limit the damage during its recent hack. 5-10 white hats helped slow down the sighting.
The results are in. Still according to SolBlaze, only 300 wallets suffered the theft of funds during the time when the white hats sThe hackers rammed with the script. This figure was more than 2000 per hour previously. A significant difference that certainly saves a lot of funds in the battle.
A script that works but causes other problems
Despite the effectiveness of this solution, it too caused a size problem. Basically, RPC serverswhose role is particularly at facilitate network traffic, broke down. Still according to Michael Hubbard, it was more of a an unfortunate coincidence to reveal a defect, with only a deliberate will.
Please DO NOT RPC Servers! IT ONLY MAKES IT HARDER FOR SOLANA AND DEVS TO FIX THE ISSUE.
— SolBlaze.org | Join us! (@solblaze_org) August 3, 2022
This failure has occurred on several RPC servers access to the Solana blockchain more difficult and there is especially it prevented users from transferring and securing their funds. Similarly, it also slowed down the work of developers and security specialists trying to find out the origin of the attack in order to stop it better. Solblaze summarizes the concerns that this script and its intense spamming have led to:
It was difficult to use probes to trace the attacker’s transactions, and it was also difficult for people to move their funds from their wallet to a more secure location.
These concerns have not failed to encourage ridicule, especially on Twitter due to the numerous outages Solana’s blockchain has had over the past several months. It is true that the stability of one of the capitalists raises the most questions. How to trust a technology solution breaks down so often Many analysts wonder about the crypto ecosystem.
Eventually, the RPC servers were repaired and were able to resume normal operation. Solana Foundation teams continued their research and showed the role of the Fana wallet as we wrote this morning in our article dedicated to this hack.
Ultimately, this case highlights, in addition to Solana’s shortcomings, white hat’s fundamental role in the crypto ecosystem. Thanks to this script and despite the concerns it may have, we can think that many users avoided having their funds stolen. These ethical hackers, true experts in computer security, have once again enabled the amount of damage to be greatly limited. They are often referred to and encountered, these hackers show that the profession is not compatible with the common good !
To learn more about another hack of the week, the Nomad bridge hack, find our article here.
