Bittensor Halts Transactions to Investigate Recent Attack

Following an attack that resulted in the loss of about $8 million worth of the TAO tokens, Bittensor has launched an investigation as it halts transactions.

There have been reports of peculiar activities on Bittensor users’ wallets, which has forced developers at the purported decentralized AI project to suspend operations temporarily. The assault led to the loss of about $8 million worth of the project’s TAO tokens from one wallet. Per insights revealed by independent security researcher ZachXBT, the loss equals 32,000 TAO.

Bittensor Team Launch Investigation into Attack

Markedly, the Bittensor team has launched into action to mitigate the losses and check for the vulnerability point.

“We are investigating, and in an abundance of caution, have recently fully halted transactions on-chain until there is more information available to us about the nature of this attack,” a Bittensor core team member wrote on the project’s Discord channel.

In the meantime, there are suspicions that the assault has to do with the leakage of a private key. This private key is a string of letters and numbers that functions as a password to protect and manage tokens in a wallet. Only a minor detail is known about the exploit, but the team is working to avoid a recurrence. This is apparent in the decision to halt transactions on the network temporarily.

As an aftermath of the assault, TAO dropped by 15%, reflecting that holders have entered a panic mode. Nevertheless, the token has made a modest recovery under the leadership of the Bittensor team. TAO was trading at $239.15 at this time, with a mere 11.3% decline over the past 24 hours. The network continues to maintain a market capitalization of approximately $1.6 billion.

The chain has been placed in “safe mode,” as Bittensor co-founder Ala Shaabana confirmed on the X app. This implies that blocks are generated, but no transactions are executed. The most recent block was certified at approximately 23:00 UTC on Tuesday, according to data from Bittensor’s block explorer.

Bittensor is identified as one of the leading companies that link machine learning models owned by various individuals worldwide. This is a noteworthy fact. It is one of the most significant cryptocurrency initiatives focused on artificial intelligence. Therefore, the recent incident involving Bittensor’s wallets indicates the increasing prevalence of frauds and exploits on prominent crypto projects.

Additional Attacks on the Crypto Sector

The Swiss crypto exchange Lykke was the victim of a cyberattack last month, which resulted in the loss of over $22 million in digital assets.

In this instance, SomaXBT, a Web3 security researcher, reported that an unknown entity withdrew 158 Bitcoin (BTC) and 2161 Ethereum (ETH) from the exchange. The BTC was allegedly transferred to numerous wallets, while the plundered ETH assets were purportedly transferred to DAI.

The renowned Cardano (ADA) blockchain was subjected to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, in which a malicious actor attempted to overwhelm the blockchain with excessive transaction traffic. Nevertheless, the team prevented the DDoS attack from causing any additional harm.

Intense security measures are required for crypto exchanges, and users must exercise caution due to the frequency of these assaults.