TL;DR
- Reports emerged on Friday that Shiba Inu’s Shibarium could be hacked following several suspicious transactions.
- The team provided more updates today, indicating that investors’ funds are safe, and also outlined what has been done already and what the next steps are.
SHIB Security Incident
After PeckShield flagged the suspicious activity on Friday, the official Shiba Inu channel on X said the team had reached out to external security partners to investigate thoroughly. One of the first updates posted on Saturday noted that a sophisticated attack, which was probably planned for months, was carried out using a flash loan to purchase 4.6 million BONE tokens.
The attacker gained access to validator signing keys, achieved majority validator power, and signed a malicious state to drain assets from the bridge. As the tokens were delegated to Validator 1, they remained locked (because of unstaking delays), which allowed the team to freeze them.
A more recent Q&A from the team, reposted by LUCIE, said only a “small amount of ETH/SHIB was moved.” According to another post , the precise amount was 224.57 ETH (valued at around $1 million) and 92.6 billion SHIB (worth roughly $1.33 million).
Other affected tokens include LEASH, ROAR, TREAT, BAD, and SHIFU, but they have not been moved or sold as of the time of the post. The attacker also tried to sell $700,000 worth of KNINE, but they failed as the K9finance DAO multi-sig blacklisted their address.
Are Funds Safe and What’s Next?
The team was adamant that all investors’ funds are safe. Staking and unstaking have been paused, and all funds have been moved and secured in multi-sig cold storage. The team has also engaged with leading security firms, such as PeckShield, Seal911, and Hexens, to investigate the incident further.
In terms of next steps, the Shiba Inu team said:
• Secure validator key transfers and confirm full chain integrity.
• Restore stake manager funds once security is assured.
• Continue coordinating with partners to freeze attacker-linked funds
• Publish a full incident report once investigations conclude.
Despite this incident, the largest native token of the project has skyrocketed in the past 24 hours. SHIB has gained over 9% of value and now sits close to $0.0000145, which is the highest level in about a month.
