On Wednesday, Virtuals Protocol, an AI-driven platform, experienced a major security breach, exposing its Discord server to unauthorized access and phishing attacks.
Hackers compromised Virtuals Protocol’s Discord server, while phishing links impersonating its official website surfaced on Google Search.
This incident came just days after the platform resolved a critical flaw in its audited smart contract.
How Hackers Exploited Virtuals Protocol’s Discord Server
The Virtuals team reported that the breach occurred after a private key belonging to one of the Discord moderators was compromised.
This granted the attackers unauthorized access to the messaging platform. The issue has since been resolved, with the server secured by the Virtuals team.
In addition to the Discord breach, cybersecurity firm Scam Sniffer identified three malicious links on Google Search impersonating the Virtuals Protocol website.
Users were warned to avoid interacting with these links and urged to verify official URLs before clicking.
Meanwhile, Virtuals Protocol addressed another major security concern earlier this month.
On January 3, the team fixed a vulnerability in its audited smart contract after security researcher @lj1nu identified the flaw in the platform's token-launching mechanism on Uniswap V2.
The vulnerability stemmed from the AgentToken creation process, which used the Clones library to make token addresses predictable.
This predictability arose from the AgentFactoryV3 contract's nonce. Additionally, the initialize function in AgentToken failed to check if a Uniswap pair already existed, risking transaction reverts and exploitation.
@lj1nu demonstrated the exploit risk using a Tenderly proof of concept. After publicly disclosing the flaw on X, Virtuals Protocol verified and patched the issue.
The fix includes additional validation steps to prevent similar flaws. The team apologized for the initial miscommunication, published the fix on BaseScan and GitHub, and relaunched its bug bounty program.
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