On Oct. 17, 2023, the Fantom Foundation reported that its employees were targets of a large-scale hack. The attacker drained $7 million. One Fantom team member lost $3.4 million from the exploit. In the tweet, Fantom said wallets worth around $550,000 in Fantom Foundation funds were affected.
The good news is that over 99% of the Fantom Foundation funds were not affected.
Tweet link: https://twitter.com/FantomFDN/status/1714337765502992798
Fantom does not have details on the mechanism of the attack that took place. A few of those wallets had the label “Foundation Wallets.” But they were not used by the organization. Since they were reassigned to a Fantom employee, this was a targeted personal attack.
A member of SlowMist, a blockchain security firm, thinks that the hacker used a private key theft. The employees in question were targeted successfully by Trojan files, social engineering, or phishing scams.
In the last week, FTM traded below 0.17 before rallying to as high as 0.21 on Saturday Oct. 21, 2023. Strong Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC) prices are lifting FTM prices, more than offsetting weakness earlier in the week (Oct. 17 – 20).
Expect the Fantom Foundation to issue an update on the hack findings. Most importantly, it will strengthen its security to prevent a re-occurrence of a hack.
