Even “mighty” Binance fell victim to a hack through a cross-chain bridge linked to the BNB chain. $570 million was lost during the period of the hack. 

We thought it was the last of it but yet again Skyward Finance, a NEAR protocol based launchpad that provides projects with enough liquidity to launch tokens and ensure fair token distribution was drained of $3 million worth of NEAR tokens through a smart contract exploit. 

The incident was noticed by a community member of the protocol, NearScout, who alerted a fellow team member and made Skyward team members aware of the situation.

The @skywardfinance was just exploited for ~1.1M $NEAR Tokens (Worth ~3M) . ????

Thnx to @NearScout for noticing the treasury drain, he pinged me asking if something is wrong with skyward… then we looked into contract txns and found out about the exploit and sus txns.

smol ????

— SankΞt Ⓝ⚡️| sanketn81.near ,sanketn81.lens ???? (@sanket_naikwadi) November 2, 2022

The hacker was able to gain access by buying a lot of Skyward tokens on Ref finance and converting them into NEAR tokens. As at the time the team got the information, there was little to nothing they could do as the treasury contracts couldn’t be paused by anyone.

Is Blockchain truly secure? 

The goal of blockchain technology is to ensure that data, information, and monetary value can be exchanged between different people in a secure, trustless, and decentralized manner. 

However, it can be argued that this goal remains an aspiration on many platforms today. The open-source characteristic of DeFi projects have allowed hackers to study vulnerabilities in smart contract code and devise means to steal from it. This remains an unpleasant situation for the web3 and cryptocurrency industry.

Notwithstanding the current shortcomings, this is a new and growing industry, with developers and cryptographers working on systems and mechanisms that will help improve the security of blockchain platforms without compromising decentralization and scalability. We hope that in a few years’ time, news of hackers and scammers will largely be a thing of the past.

Using crypto safely 

There are some safety tips you can adopt to make interacting with blockchains safer. It doesn’t guarantee 100% safety but can still help reduce proximity to personal attacks or protocol attacks.

• Don’t save passwords on your desktop, or mobile browser. They are best written down and stored safely offline. 
• Confirm the authenticity of a link before clicking or interacting with it.
• Diversification of cryptocurrencies in different Web3 wallets is another way to ensure safety. If a hack happens on a particular wallet, funds lost can be minimal since you don’t have all your eggs present in one basket. 
• Purchase a Cold wallet to keep your private keys. Hot wallets are more prone to attacks and compromises due to their being connected to the internet. 

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