AirDAO Suffers $1 Million Platform Breach

The community-driven layer-one blockchain AirDAO has fallen victim to a hacking incident, resulting in the loss of 126.5 ETH (~$450,000) and 41.61 million AMB (~$512,000).

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

According to the statement, the perpetrator withdrew funds from the AMB/ETH pool on the decentralized exchange Uniswap.

The specific attack vector remains undisclosed, but the AirDAO team reported that the hacker gained unauthorized access through “social engineering fraud,” posing as a major project partner.

The criminal likely attached a malicious link to an email.

“This was an isolated theft of the liquidity pool. It will not affect user funds on the AirDAO blockchain or exchanges, nor the treasury’s multisig,” network representatives noted.

AirDAO also offered the hacker a reward of 10% of the stolen funds for the return of the assets. Otherwise, the blockchain team will contact law enforcement to investigate the incident.

According to PeckShield, the hacker has already transferred the cryptocurrency to centralized exchanges, including MEXC, KuCoin, and ChangeNOW.

#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

Analysts at SlowMist added that part of the stolen funds were sent to Binance and BitMart.

Founded in 2022, AirDAO positions itself as a community-driven Web3 ecosystem of decentralized applications based on the Ambrosus Network blockchain with the native token AMB.

In February, experts at Immunefi estimated the damage to cryptocurrency projects from hacks and scams at $67 million.

In March, the DeFi protocol Mozaic Finance lost $2 million in a hacking incident.

The decentralized exchange WOOFi reported a theft of $8.75 million following an exploit of the swap service in the L2 network Arbitrum.