The Fantom Foundation, a non-profit organization that develops the Fantom blockchain platform, eliminated a significant vulnerability after a $550,000 hack in October.
On October 17, the Fantom Foundation suffered a wallet hack, in which an unknown attacker drained 1% of the Fantom Foundation’s funds. The foundation subsequently stopped using some of the affected wallets and reassigned them to a Fantom employee, making it a “targeted attack.”
After the incident, an anonymous security researcher found additional potential risk associated with the hack and alerted the Fantom Foundation, according to a Nov. 20 blog post. The vulnerability was associated with an inactive management token for Fantom’s ERC-20 FTM contract. which could potentially allow the attacker the ability to mint a piece of Fantom (FTM) for themselves on Ethereum.
According to the Fantom Foundation, the discovered vulnerability could have allowed the hacker to drain $170 million using access to the wallet. The organization said the value of the potential loss is based on the price of the token at the time of the attack, “although this estimate does not consider insufficient market liquidity to fully absorb the tokens.”
The Fantom Foundation said the vulnerability was “quickly mitigated” and the organization awarded the anonymous researcher $1.7 million in recognition of the contribution. The announcement added:
“The Fantom Foundation is dedicated to maintaining the highest security standards for our platform and we remain grateful for the security researchers who contribute to this effort.”
The Fantom Foundation did not immediately respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comment.
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Even though the Fantom Foundation lost half a million to a hack a month ago, the Fantom token has risen in the last four weeks. The token has added 82% in value since October 17, trading at $0.31 at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko. The token is also up 78% over the past year, according to the data.
Launched in late 2019, the Fantom network is a blockchain protocol that allows users to create and deploy decentralized applications (DApps). Opera from the Fantom Foundation is a permissionless blockchain supported by the Ethereum virtual machine, allowing users to interact with the Fantom network on MetaMask, a leading self-custodial cryptocurrency wallet.
The recent $550,000 Fantom hack is not the first attack on the Fantom Foundation or its users. In July 2023, Fantom suffered a massive multi-chain bridge hack, resulting in the loss of $126 million in cryptocurrency. Fantom creator Andre Cronje later claimed that the Fantom team was misled about the actual security level of Multichain, which ceased operations in mid-July 2023.
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