AirDAO has offered hackers a 10% bounty reward for the return of the stolen funds.
Community-governed layer-1 (L1) blockchain AirDAO has suffered a security exploit resulting in hackers draining 35.2 million AMB and 125.51 ETH from its AMB/ETH Uniswap pool.
According to PeckShield monitoring, the stolen funds have been moved to multiple cryptocurrency exchanges, including MEXC, KuCoin, and ChangeNOW. On-chain data also shows that part of the stolen funds were transferred to Binance and BitMart. This is believed to be part of an effort to cash out the illicit proceeds.
#PeckShieldAlert @airdao_io has reported that they suffered a hack,resulting in the loss of 126.5 $ETH & 41.61M $AMB.
The hacker has transferred the stolen funds to #MEXC, #ChangeNOW and #KuCoin https://t.co/W8rnC6oKeg pic.twitter.com/WLdvAlnbeg— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) March 21, 2024
The AirDAO team has identified and confirmed the exploit.
A Social Engineering Scam
According to the team, the hackers operated through a sophisticated social engineering scam. This scam involves perpetrators using false pretenses to convince victims to share personal information.
The AirDAO team has identified a theft of 35.2m AMB tokens and 125.51 ETH from our AMB/ETH Uniswap pool. We are working with exchanges and relevant authorities to identify the hacker and retrieve all stolen funds. If the hacker returns the funds immediately we will pay a white… pic.twitter.com/lGWrT6ZCWJ
— AirDAO (@airdao_io) March 21, 2024
Without providing many details, the team stated that attackers gained access to the Uniswap pool after AirDAO clicked malicious attachments from an email posing as one of its known partners.
“They obtained access to the LP using a social engineering scam with malicious attachments in an email presenting to be one of our known partners,” they said on X (Twitter).
AirDAO stated that it had contacted the exchanges the attackers used to help track and freeze the stolen funds.
AirDAO Offers 10% Bounty
The platform added that it would pay a 10% white hat hacking fee if the attackers returned the stolen funds as soon as possible, but failure to do so would lead to the continuation of the investigation by law enforcement.
AirDAO has promised to return liquidity to the pool.
“Additional liquidity will be added back to the uniswap LP as soon as possible and the worst of the situation is over.”
Interestingly, the attack did not negatively impact AMB, the native token of the AirDAO ecosystem. At the time of writing this line, AMB was trading at $0.01226, representing a 6.28% surge on the day.
