Root-cause analysis not yet published. The incident description below contains all currently available signal — review the attack transaction directly for definitive forensics.
According to a number of community users, there seems to be a problem in the Layer2 interoperability protocol Connext airdrop claim process. The NEXT tokens of some accounts were claimed to unexpected addresses. The data on the chain shows that the address starting with 0x44Af received a large number of Connext token NEXT airdrops through 230 accounts in the past 1 hour, and sold them all for ETH, USDT and USDC, earning nearly 39,000 US dollars. According to SlowMist analysis, users can claim NEXT tokens through the claimBySignature function of the NEXT Distributor contract. There are recipient and beneficiary roles, the recipient role is used to receive the NEXT tokens of the claim, and the beneficiary role is the address that is eligible to receive NEXT tokens, which has been determined when the Connext protocol announces the air investment qualifications. When the user makes a NEXT token claim, the contract will perform two checks: one is to check the signature of the beneficiary role, and the other is to check whether the beneficiary role is eligible to receive the airdrop. During the first check, it will check whether the recipient passed in by the user is signed by the beneficiary role, so the random incoming recipient address cannot pass the check if it is not signed by the beneficiary. If you specify a beneficiary address to construct a signature, even if it can pass the signature check, it cannot pass the second check on the eligibility for airdrops. Airdrop claim eligibility checks are checked through Merkle proofs, which should be officially generated by the Connext protocol. Therefore, users who are not eligible to receive airdrops cannot bypass the check to receive other people's airdrops. On September 7, Connext released a post-mortem analysis, stating that the attacker performed DOS operations on Tokensoft’s API, causing the claim database and UI to crash. During this process, 274,956 NEXT from 253 wallets (not related to Connext) were claimed (0.26% of the total airdrop) and sold for approximately 40,000 USDT before ordinary users were able to claim it. But Connext was not compromised in any way. After the DOS attack ended, airdrop claims returned to normal. Attack method (per SlowMist): DoS Attack. Reported loss: $ 39,000.
- chain
- —
- protocol
- Connext
- bug_class
- unknown
- date_occurred
- 2023-09-05
- loss_usd
- $39,000
- source_id
- sm:connext::2023-09-05