This Hacker Makes $51M Profits Exploiting This Solana Vulnerabilty
In only one week, a particular wallet was able to amass more than $51 million through sandwich attacks on crypto transactions within the Solana blockchain. This signals the exposed flaws in the decentralized finance sector.
The sandwich attack, a sophisticated maneuver, is a routine that involves enriching a specific individual with the news of a pending trade, keeping the asset, raising its price, and finally proceeding with the original trade, making a profit due to the price hike. The process frequently includes the practice of immediately ordering in the near-by and far-end time of the target trade.
Problems In Solana
Solana, quite often chosen for its high throughput and low fees, is now experiencing the repercussions of scale and increasing network vulnerability wrought by its quick growth and popularity.
The wallet address arsc4jbDnzaqcCLByyGo7fg7S2SmcFsWUzQuDtLZh2y has successfully paused the game as soon as a victim has shown any vulnerability, irrespective of which slot of the player. What’s more, it is precisely at this time that the attacker exploits the price difference within the Solana ecosystem, frequently resulting in losses
Although the risks are real, a considerable number of users have since shown their disposition and determination by proposing measures to curtail future attacks. Some recommendations might be blocking related accounts, answering the problem of slippage, and limiting big orders by dividing them into smaller units.
The wallet’s huge gains highlight the extreme need for strong security measures in the Solana Network, which would help avoid malicious practices like sandwich attacks and other fraudulent practices.
Not the First Time
The similarity to a previous event is quite striking. On April 20, 2023, the mysterious owner of another cryptocurrency wallet known as “jaredfromsubway” made a killing capitalizing on the sandwich attack, making a $1.67 million profit within just two days. As a result of the inveterate dispense on the pay-per-view for the perseverance of the month, the attackers’ profits soared to an estimated 4 million dollars.
Bots in DeFi are not a new phenomenon. Paper trade has been entering the market since. These attackers intelligently pick up the addresses of fellow users under the pretext of tracing landing transactions on behalf of DeFi exchanges.
The most discussed advantage DeFi offers is user-to-user interaction without any intermediaries; however, this version does not imply any fidelity between traders, which is, in turn, shown off by the tactics of sandwich attacks, which remind developers and users to be more security conscious.
