Telcoin (TEL) in Turmoil: $1.3 Million Exploit Triggers 37% Price Plunge

• DeFi platform Telcoin suffered a $1.3 million exploit attributed to issues with the proxy implementation of its wallet on Polygon.
• Telcoin has taken measures to address the exploit, deploying a fix to prevent further unauthorized access to user funds.

The decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Telcoin has fallen victim to a $1.3 million exploit attributed to problems with the proxy implementation of the wallet on Polygon.

Despite the holiday season, malicious actors have remained active. In 2023 alone, bad actors pilfered more than $1.7 billion in crypto assets, and this trend has persisted throughout the past month.

Telcoin took to Twitter to inform users that a fix has been deployed to prevent further exploitation of funds by hackers. The platform asserts that the exploit’s root cause lies not in the Telcoin wallet code but in the “proxy implementation of the wallet on Polygon”. In its update on Twitter, Telcoin wrote:

We plan to restore all wallets to their previous balances (for all affected assets) prior to turning the app service back on, which may take some time. No keys, backend systems, or user data were breached. We will provide another update soon and appreciate everyone’s patience and support.

PeckShield, a blockchain security firm, approximates that the cyber attackers made off with approximately $1.3 million in cryptocurrency as a result of the exploit. The accompanying screenshot illustrates a nearly 37% decline in the price of TEL within the last 24 hours.

Crypto Hacks on the Rise

In another development, on-chain trading platform Thunder Terminal successfully thwarted an exploit totaling $240,000 that targeted 114 wallets on its platform, reassuring users about the security of their funds. However, the hacker disputes these assurances, dismissing them as “all lies” and is now demanding an extra ransom for user data.

As per Thunder’s incident report on December 27, no private keys or wallets were compromised during the exploit. The total losses from the attack amounted to 86.5 Ether (ETH) and 439 Solana (SOL), equivalent to $240,000, occurring within a brief nine-minute period.

Introduced by Eversify Labs in late 2022, Thunder Terminal is a trading platform designed for rapid transactions across various blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and Arbitrum. It positions itself as a competitor to Telegram trading bots like Unibot.

The incident report detailed that the exploit occurred when an attacker gained access to a “MongoDB connection URL,” enabling them to execute withdrawals on behalf of users. The compromise originated from the exploitation of MongoDB’s system eight days prior, resulting in a breach in Thunder’s data. Thunder clarified that only 114 wallets out of 14,000 were affected, assuring impacted users of full refunds, 0% fees, and $100,000 in platform credits.

Despite Thunder’s claim of securing user data, a message from the attacker on Etherscan contradicted these assurances, asserting that Thunder’s statements were “all lies.” The hacker asserted possession of all user data and insisted on a 50 ETH ($110,000) ransom for its deletion. Etherscan data revealed that the hackers’ wallet sent 86.3 ETH to the Railgun protocol for anonymizing transactions.