Cybersecurity agency Hacken has blamed a personal key leak that allowed a foul actor to mint and loot $250,000 value of the ecosystem’s native Hacken Token (HAI), inflicting it to plummet round 99% on Saturday.
In an X publish, Hacken said the non-public key was related to an account with a minting position on the Ethereum and BNB Chain, which led to the “unauthorized HAI minting and a dump” on decentralized exchanges — causing a 99% drop within the worth of HAI from $0.015 to $0.000056.
HAI is at the moment buying and selling at $0.00026.
Hacken group members stated they’ve since revoked the compromised minter account from the token contract and regained management; nevertheless, based mostly on Hacken’s present estimates, the unhealthy actor nonetheless managed to flee with a minimum of $250,000 value of tokens.
“The core infrastructure has all the time been separate from HAI infra and stays safe. There may be at the moment no proof of any compromise past the non-public keys,” Hacken stated.
Private key leak linked to bridge deployment
Hacken stated the non-public key was compromised throughout “architectural adjustments” to the agency’s blockchain bridge, which have been being utilized “particularly to forestall dangers like this,” in line with Hacken.
“Hacken’s bridge was constructed at a time when the market and tech seemed very totally different. Redesigning a deployed bridge means migrating contracts — a posh authorized and technical course of,” the agency stated.
As a precaution, Hacken has paused bridge transactions on Ethereum and BNB Chain till additional discover and warned that there were no airdrops planned and that any posts saying in any other case are scams.
Tokens purchased after hack not supported
Hacken CEO Dyma Budorin said in an X publish on Sunday that each one tokens on the affected networks, BNB Sensible Chain and Ethereum, purchased after the hack “is not going to be supported within the new tokenomics.”
“Our purpose was all the time to transform HAI right into a safety token that represents Hacken fairness and has crypto flexibility. Now could be the time to speed up the thought implementation,” he stated.
Hacken stated its long-term purpose now’s to remodel HAI right into a regulated monetary device that merges token utility with fairness rights by merging HAI and Hacken’s fairness shareholders.
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All official person balances stay trackable, and HAI tokens can have the choice to swap later, with particulars coming quickly, in line with Hacken.
Hackers stole $1.6 billion in first quarter this 12 months
Blockchain safety agency PeckShield said in an April report that hackers stole over $1.63 billion in crypto in the course of the first quarter of 2025.
Extra just lately, liquid staking protocol Meta pool suffered a similar exploit on June 18, when an attacker was in a position to mint 9,705 of the liquid staking protocol’s token mpETH value practically $27 million however solely managed to steal round 52.5 Ether (ETH), value simply over $132,000.
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