Solana Blames Slope For Private Key Leak In Wallet Exploit

An investigation into Tuesday’s private wallet exploit within the Solana SOL/USD ecosystem revealed that Solana wallet Slope was to blame.

What Happened: The root cause of the attack was due to an accidental leak of users’ private keys from Slope wallets' backend, Solana Status said on Wednesday.

This exploit was isolated to one wallet on Solana, and hardware wallets used by Slope remain secure.

While the details of exactly how this occurred are still under investigation, but private key information was inadvertently transmitted to an application monitoring service. 2/3

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) August 3, 2022

“There is no evidence the Solana protocol or its cryptography was compromised,” stated Solana on Twitter.

The private keys were compromised as a result of Slope inadvertently sharing seed phrases with an application monitoring service, said Solana.

Slope issued a statement addressing the breach, saying they “have some hypotheses” about the nature of the breach but “nothing is yet firm.”

Meanwhile, on-chain analysts speculated that the exploit was possible because hackers gained access to user seed phrases that Slope logged in to its centralized servers.

Correction - the Slope wallet did not send seed phrases to external partners, but may have logged them on their own centralized servers. Apologies for getting a bit ahead of myself, postmortem still in progress. Wait for an announcement from the team for true confirmation.

— foobar (@0xfoobar) August 3, 2022

“I would advise anyone that touched slope to regenerate their seed phrase in a different wallet asap,” said Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

Price Action: At press time, SOL was trading at $39.51, up 2.42% over the last 24 hours, as per data from Benzinga Pro.