Hack: the Safemoon crypto project loses $9M

The liquidity pool from Safemoon was siphoned off. From pirates managed to get their hands on nearly 9 million dollars in tokens.

Tuesday, the DeFi protocol based on BNB Chain Safemoon was the victim of an attack. A bug allowed hackers to steal 8.9 million dollars in the cash pool of its digital coin.

The hacking has been confirmed by Safemoon last night and its CEO John Karony communicated in more detail about the drama early this morning.

To our valued community, As you may know, on Tuesday, March 28, SafeMoon’s cash pool was compromised […] We have located the suspected exploit, patched the vulnerability, and hired a blockchain cybersecurity consultant to determine the precise nature and scope of the exploit,” he tweeted.

The executive added that other LP pools on DEX were not affected. “I also want to assure you that the SafeMoon portfolio, secured by Orbital Shield, continues to be a safe place to store your crypto,” he concluded.

Specifically, the attacker used the public burn () function, which allows any user to burn tokens from any other address, to remove FMS from the Safemoon-WBNB Liquidity Pool, artificially increasing the price of FMS, explained DeFi Mark, CEO of Dappd.

The hacker was then able to sell FMS into this LP at a significantly overpriced rate in the same transaction, eliminating the remaining WBNB in the cash pool.

Follow Corners.en on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook or Telegram to not miss anything. Subscribe to our crypto newsletter to receive a news summary every week.