Bancor forced to hack itself after identifying critical vulnerability, BNT price recovers after initial drop

Decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol, Bancor Network, has identified a critical vulnerability in its latest smart contract update, which could have caused a loss of around $460,000 worth user funds. The vulnerability was detected by the security team of the blockchain project recently. The developers later carried out a controlled independent attack on the network, exploiting the vulnerability to transfer all assets to safe addresses.

The team assured its customers that all funds on Bancor are currently safe. After discovering the vulnerability, users who made transactions in the 48 hours were asked to withdraw all transactions associated with the smart contract's three addresses. They include - 0x8dFEB86C7C962577deD19AB2050AC78654feA9F7; 0x5f58058C0eC971492166763c8C22632B583F667f; and 0x923cAb01E6a4639664aa64B76396Eec0ea7d3a5f. The Bancor team warned its users that the funds in these wallets might be affected due to the vulnerability

In a recent blog, Bancor wrote:

Exchange smart contracts like Bancor’s use allowance to interact with user wallets. This is a common practice used by most DAPPs. But in this case, a private function that should have been restricted to the contract alone was made public. This essentially allowed anyone to transfer tokens which were approved only for the contract to transfer. 

A new network contract was then pushed to ensure that an error like this does not recur. Trading within the system is now back to normal.

The identification of this new vulnerability has caused the prices of BNT tokens to drop by 10% in just a few hours. However, it has since recovered pretty spectacularly.

BNT/USDT daily chart

BNT/USDT bulls took charge this Friday and picked up the price level from 0.7668 to 0.8247 to 0.8315. BNT/USDT bulls can continue their charge if they overcome resistance at 0.8474 and 0.876. The price has healthy support at 0.7694, SMA 20 and 0.7181