During the Arbitrum airdrop launched the day before, unknown attackers stole $500,000 by forging vanity addresses legitimate recipients of tokens. This drew the attention of Twitter users.
Someone made $500k+ by claiming Arbitrum airdrop with hacked vanity addresses pic.twitter.com/aSWmx7MySS
— jq (@jackqack) March 23, 2023
Vanity addresses are vulnerable to brute force – a systematic search of all possible combinations of characters. Hackers received information about wallets eligible to receive ARB tokens, after which they generated similar ones by sending coins to them.
Affected users try to fix the problem on their own.
Dear @kucoincom my stolen $ARB token has been transferred to your exchange by the hacker. How can you help?
— CryptoLord NE 📊📈 (@CryptoDefiLord) March 23, 2023
According to Nansen, an analytics company, airdrop participants have already received over 914 million ARB or 79% of the total of 1.1 billion ARB allocated for distribution in the first stage. 138,671 addresses have not yet requested governance tokens.
Recall that the distribution of ARB, which started on March 23, provoked network congestion, due to which the Arbitrum Foundation sites and the Arbiscan on-chain browser became temporarily unavailable.
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