Fantom awards $1.7M to safety researcher for averting $170M loss

• The Fantom Basis says the $1.7 million is bounty for a safety researcher whose fast alert helped stop a possible $170 million hack.
• Fantom had misplaced $550k in October, with the hack concentrating on a reassigned pockets seeing an worker lose $7 million.

The Fantom Basis, the non-profit organisation behind the crypto platform Fantom, rewarded a safety researcher whose efforts helped foil a possible catastrophic hack.

Fantom’s award of $1.7 million was revealed in a weblog put up on Monday, November 20. 

Bounty pertains to $550k hack

In accordance with the Fantom Basis, the bounty pertains to the October 17 incident that noticed an attacker drain over $550k from a Fantom pockets that had been reassigned to an worker. The “focused assault” reportedly noticed the worker lose over $7 million.

pic.twitter.com/gShkT3C9XV

— Fantom Basis (@FantomFDN) October 17, 2023

However whereas Fantom Basis maintained its wallets weren’t impacted in any main method, with funds secure, a researcher discovered a vulnerability that uncovered them to extra harm.

“A safety researcher recognized an extra potential danger related to the compromise and reached out promptly to alert us,” the platform famous within the weblog put up.

$170 million hack prevented

The alert by the unidentified researcher pointed to the potential danger posed to Fantom’s ERC-20 FTM contract. Apparently, the earlier assault on the stated pockets had left it weak to an assault that might see the hacker(s) mint FTM tokens on Ethereum. The compromised pockets held “a dormant admin token.”

In accordance with the Fantom Basis, the blockchain researcher’s fast response helped avert a attainable lack of $170 million. For his efforts, the researcher has been awarded $1.7 million.

That incident got here roughly three months after Fantom suffered a $126 million exploit in July. 

The safety breach and subsequent heist was associated to the Multichain bridge hack. Efforts to forestall such losses have seen the Fantom crew take a sturdy strategy to community safety