Weekly News Digest #85

Concerted attack against Terra UST: could it take place?

This week Terra UST, one of the largest algorithmic stablecoins, experienced a tremendous crash. Its fall below $1 caused the downward pressure on Bitcoin as well as led to the collapse of its sister token Luna. There are a few theories behind what may have happened. And one of these theories states that “concerted attack” on the Terra ecosystem could have caused the crash. In this attack, the claimed bad actor made off with more than $800M. 

Paolo Ardoino, the chief technology officer behind Tether, believes that there was likely an attack against Terra. Terra’s UST depeg on Sunday was mostly attributable to a few massive withdrawals from Anchor, Terra-based DeFi protocol offering the high yield to those who deposit Terra. Currently, there is a need for investigation to determine whether the attack indeed took place. 

Pro-russia “Killnet” hackers target Italian institutions

A pro-russia hacker group “Killnet” claimed a cyberattack on the websites belonging to Italian institutions. On 11 May, the websites belonging to Italy’s Defense Ministry, Senate, and National Health Institute were not functioning. Officials from these institutions have not provided any comments yet.

The attack against Italy is the continuation of a series of cyberattacks against Western countries carried out by russia-linked hackers. Namely, before hitting Italy, russian hackers attempted to compromise German institutions but they failed. Killnet is known for relying on DDoS attacks. 

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FTM slumped after another DEX attack

One of the biggest Fantom’s DeFi exchanges SpiritSwap was compromised and malicious actors managed to steal around $18K. The exchange was forced to cease operations to prevent further losses. For the past three months, it is the fourth major Fantom attack. For example, in April, Deus Finance was exploited for $13M. As a result, FTM price has plummetted by more than 80% and is now trading at a bit more than $0.3. 

Recently several major crypto projects have been compromised due to a vulnerability in the domain hosting platform Godaddy. On Friday, several other major platforms were targeted by malicious campaigns. 

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Italian police thwarted cyberattacks from pro-russian hackers during Eurovision

The pro-russia hacker groups Killnent and Legion attacked network infrastructure during Eurovision performances and voting. Killnet threatened to send billions of requests to Eurovision’s online voting system and add votes to some other countries. 

The cyberattacks did not cause any real damage. This year russia was banned from participating in Eurovision due to its invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine won Eurovision and the next year this song contest will take place in one of its cities. 

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Bad actors hacked the Ferrari website to push the NFT scam

The subdomain of the car manufacturer was compromised and malicious actors used to host the NFT scam several months after Ferrari had announced its plans to craft NFTs based on its cars. Fortunately, bad actors had managed to steal only a few hundred dollars in ETH before they were identified and taken down. 

The breach was detected by the bug bounty hunter Sam Curry on 5 May. He made a public post regarding this breach on Twitter as well as informed Ferrari’s security team. Ferrari has simply taken the subdomain offline. 

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