This led to the emergence of a security vulnerability that negatively affected experienced crypto investors.

On September 19, some Banana Gun users reported unauthorized external transfers from their wallets. This led Banana Gun to decide to temporarily shut down the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Solana bots. Thus, a precaution was taken to prevent further losses.

Crypto trading bots are designed to facilitate automated trading, often used by crypto investors to increase profitability.

Initial investigations showed that the attack affected 36 users, resulting in a total loss of approximately $2 million in Ether. However, Banana Gun’s post-mortem report revealed a higher loss value despite fewer users being affected.

“A total of 11 users were affected and $3 million was withdrawn. All affected users will be fully refunded from the Banana Gun treasury and no tokens will be sold for compensation,” company officials said. This increased the severity of the situation, considering that hackers often target new and inexperienced investors.

The Banana Gun attacker targeted experienced crypto traders with the ability to manually transfer ETH from wallets while using trading bots.

Manual unauthorized transfers and in-bot notifications about transfers led Banana Gun to suspect that the hacker was exploiting a vulnerability in a Telegram message oracle.

After patching the vulnerability, Banana Gun restarted the EVM and Solana bots, implementing various security measures to prevent further loss of funds. These measures included a two-hour transfer delay, two-factor authentication (2FA) for transfers, and a comprehensive review of systems.

On September 21, the hacker who stole $5 million from a yield protocol called Shezmu decided to return most of the stolen funds after accepting a white hat bounty.

Shezmu discovered that one of the stablecoin vaults had been exploited, and the hacker demanded that 90% of the stolen funds be returned via an on-chain message within 24 hours. In the process, the hacker initially sent back 282.18 Ether and then made another refund with 137 Wrapped Ether (WETH).

This incident once again revealed the importance of security measures in cryptocurrency markets. It was emphasized that users should be careful and comply with security protocols when using trading bots and other digital assets.

Additionally, platforms’ obligations to protect users and the obligation to implement constantly updated security measures to prevent such incidents have become more important in the crypto world. Closing such vulnerabilities is critical to increasing user trust and protecting the overall health of the market.