The Fantom Foundation team, developing the Fantom blockchain ecosystem, announced that it has resolved a significant security vulnerability following a $550,000 hack attack in October. On October 17th, the Fantom Foundation fell victim to a hot wallet attack by an unidentified attacker who seized assets equivalent to 1% of the foundation’s funds. As a result, the foundation stopped using some of the wallets.
How is the Process Going?
After the attack, an unnamed security researcher revealed an additional potential risk associated with the attack in a blog post published on November 20th, alerting Fantom Foundation officials. The security vulnerability found was related to an administrative criterion for Fantom’s ERC-20 FTM contract, which could have allowed the attacker to have authorization rights over certain Fantom criteria in the Ethereum ecosystem.
According to the Fantom Foundation, the security vulnerability could have allowed the hacker to seize assets worth $170 million using wallet access. The organization stated that the estimated loss value was based on the token price at the time of the attack, but it did not take into account the insufficient liquidity of the market to completely absorb the tokens.
The Fantom Foundation stated that the security vulnerability was quickly mitigated and rewarded the unnamed developer’s contributions with $1.7 million. The announcement included the following statement:
“The Fantom Foundation is dedicated to upholding the highest security standards for our platform, and we are grateful to the security researchers who have contributed to this effort.”
Continues to Delight Fantom Investors
Despite losing $550,000 in a hack attack just a month ago, the Fantom token managed to make its investors happy by experiencing a rise in the past four weeks. According to data from CoinGecko, the token has gained 82% since October 17th and was trading at $0.31 at the time of writing. The data also shows a 78% increase in the token’s value over the past year.
Introduced to users in late 2019, the Fantom network is a blockchain protocol that enables users to develop and present decentralized applications. Fantom Foundation’s Opera is a permissionless blockchain network compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, allowing users to interact with the Fantom ecosystem through the popular cryptocurrency wallet, MetaMask.
