The Raydium Hack - Solana

Another day, another private key stolen. That seems to be the ongoing trend for all the crypto attacks we have seen of late. The latest victim of this trend is the Raydium DEX (Decentralized EXchange)

The Raydium exchange was built with the objective of giving users access to a secure, fast and user-friendly trading experience within the fast-growing Solana ecosystem.

Raydium is what's known as an AMM or an Automated Market Maker. This is a platform that allows traders to purchase and sell cryptocurrency tokens through Liquidity Pools, which calculate the prices of token pairs based on pre-defined arithmetic formulae. For the Solana ecosystem, Raydium is one of the biggest AMMs out there.

On the 16th of December, 2022, the Raydium Dex lost over $4.4M from its liquidity pools. An attacker was able to sign transactions as the admin wallet, which allowed them to steal the trading fees that had been collected by the protocol as a result of user activity within the liquidity pools. This was apparently the result of the Raydium smart contract owner's private key being stolen by an attacker. After they came in control of the private key, the attacker took over some of the contract's functions and carried out the theft.

The following LPs (Liquidity Pools) were affected by the hack:

SOL-USDC

SOL-USDT

UXP-USDC

whETH-USDC

ZBC-USDC

RAY-USDC

stSOL-USDC

RAY-USDT

RAY-SOL

As we have seen before in cases with stolen private keys, how it happened remains a mystery here, too. How the attacker got access to the private key is not yet known, but this incident serves to remind us yet again that one of the most important aspects of security within the blockchain ecosystem is to protect your private keys. By all means, NEVER REVEAL YOUR PRIVATE KEYS to anyone.

Worried about attackers targeting your smart contracts? Contact DeTaSECURE today for all your smart contract audit needs!