On August 03, 2022, Avalanche (AVAX) Ceo Emin Gun Sirer, a computer scientist, made a stunning comment on his Twitter page in light of the recent attack on the Solana (SOL) ecosystem.
First, he sympathized with those affected by the attack and hoped they recover in no time. The attacker could access the wallet’s private keys by hacking a JS library and extracting them.
At first, the wallets affected were said to be accounts of about 9 months and above. But later, it was reported that newer accounts were affected. Over 7000 wallets were affected at the time of this writing, and it’s still rising, affecting one every 20 min.
IOTA, an open-sourced distributed ledger system designed specifically for the internet of things, experienced something similar to Solana (SOL) and never seemed to recover to date. A compromised private key now in possession of two individuals can complicate things simply because it will be extremely hard to figure out the legitimate owner.
Therefore stopping the chain because of an attack won’t help because once the chain resumes activity, so will the hacker. Some users have insinuated that a faulty random number generator could be the cause. However, that may not be realistic in this era of technological advancement.
Emin Gun Sirer also noted that he does not expect the hacker to crack the keys due to a lack of entropy. This is simply because there were reports from multiple browsers, and it would affect not just Solana (SOL) but all internet systems.
Finally, he commented that hardware wallets and CEXes were largely unaffected. Therefore holding your SOL assets on them is relatively safe.
In summary, the Solana (SOL) ecosystem attack has proved fatal to those affected. It has made a lot of people lose not only faith in the Solana (ETH) ecosystem but also in the crypto industry in general.
