Solana’s Phantom Wallet Hit With Fresh DDoS Attack

Solana’s Phantom wallet has come under what was described on the X app as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

Phantom Wallet Attack: No Funds Lost

According to the update shared, the protocol has discovered several attempts to overload its systems. To that effect, some of Phantom’s services have been suspended temporarily until the vulnerability is fixed. It was also announced that all Phantom wallet assets are safe, therefore users have no reason to fret. 

Further details about the DDoS attack are yet to be released. Notably, the attack comes only a few months after the Phantom wallet integrated Bitcoin, Ordinals, and BRC-20 tokens, opening itself up for more intense scrutiny from hackers.

Usually, such DDoS attacks are designed to target vulnerabilities in a system. Sometimes, it can be in the form of sending more traffic than the network can handle or overwhelming an application with more requests than it can process. 

PSA:

We're currently experiencing a DDOS attack. There are attempts to overload our systems and some services may be temporarily interrupted.

Your assets are all safe. Thanks for bearing with us while we work to resolve these issues.

We will post an update when things are back…

— Phantom (@phantom) February 1, 2024

In the blockchain ecosystem, the major form of DDoS attack is transaction flooding which ends up compromising the availability of the original users of a protocol. With time, this has an undesirable impact on the network. Also, such DDoS attacks could be done through smart contracts. 

The ultimate goal of the DDoS attack is to overwhelm the system and cart away funds if the opportunity arises. In the wake of this exploit, Phantom Wallet said it will update its community on what really happened.

Solana and the Rich History of Attacks

For a very long time, Solana has been a victim of attacks from bad actors seeking systems to exploit. A few years ago, there were a handful of attacks on the Solana ecosystem and at that time, Slowmist, a blockchain security company issued a warning to the users of the protocol to beware of malicious exploits. 

In one of the attacks, Solana’s Decentralized Finance (DeFi) token bridge Wormhole was exploited by some scammers who stole $320 million worth of Ethereum (ETH).

In January 2022, there were even suspicions of a DDoS attack on Solana but ultimately, the scare was identified as some unresolved congestion problems. Later that year, there was an actual attack on the Phantom wallet which led to the loss of more than $6 million with about 7000+ wallets compromised.

Meanwhile, these attacks are not peculiar to the Phantom wallet or other Solana-based DApps, rather it is a challenge that continually plagues the DeFi ecosystem. Last year, the DeFi project Onyx Protocol became a victim of attackers and lost ETH worth $2.1 million in a flash loan scam.

A few days ago, Manta Network faced a major DDoS attack with over 135 million RPC requests, testing its resilience and security amidst growth. It is worth noting that the activities of these scammers are growing daily and becoming more complex to tackle.