On October 29, a new contract deployed by Unibot, a popular Telegram bot used for trading on Uniswap, fell victim to an exploit that resulted in the theft of approximately $560,000 worth of various memecoins from users. The incident remained undetected until October 31 when blockchain analytics firm Scopescan alerted Unibot users to the ongoing hack.
According to Unibot’s official statement:
“We experienced a token approval exploit from our new router and have paused our router to contain the issue.”
The exploit led to a drain of crypto holdings for multiple users. As the investigation unfolds, Scopescan has advised users to revoke approvals for the exploited contract (0x126c9FbaB3A2FCA24eDfd17322E71a5e36E91865) and transfer their funds to a new wallet to prevent further losses.
The attacker is reportedly in the process of converting the stolen memecoins into Ether. Market sentiment reacted negatively to the news, with the UNIBOT token seeing a 42.7% drop in its price within one hour, plummeting from $57.56 to $32.94. However, at the time of writing, the token has been making efforts to recover.
Unibot has pledged to compensate all users affected by the contract exploit, and the loot mainly consisted of cryptocurrencies such as Joe (JOE), UNIBOT, and BeerusCat (BCAT). Scopescan has also uncovered the deployment of a suspicious address, 0x835B, which matches the exploited address, and is being used to receive tokens from unsuspecting victims.
This incident follows a similar contract exploit that recently drained 280 ETH from users of Maestrobots, a collection of cryptocurrency bots accessible through the Telegram Messenger app. In response to this exploit, Maestrobots took it upon themselves to compensate affected users, distributing a total of 610 ETH to cover their losses. The compensation amounted to 334 ETH, boosted by an additional 20% as a gesture of goodwill.
Notably, blockchain security firm CertiK confirmed its involvement in tracking and verifying the transactions related to the 334 ETH compensation paid out to Maestrobots users, demonstrating the ongoing commitment to address security vulnerabilities in the crypto space.
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