AirDAO suffers exploit, hackers transfer stolen funds to MEXC, KuCoin, ChangeNOW

A community-governed layer one blockchain AirDAO has reportedly suffered a hacker attack, resulting in a loss of 126.5 ETH and 41.61 million AMB tokens.

The AirDAO team disclosed in an X post on Mar. 21 that the project had fallen victim to a hacker attack, leading to a loss of 35.2 million AMB tokens and 125.51 ETH from its AMB/ETH Uniswap pool.

While the exact method of the attack remains undisclosed, the team revealed that the perpetrator gained unauthorized access “using a social engineering scam with malicious attachments in an email presenting to be one of our known partners.”

“This was an isolated theft of the liquidity pool. This does not affect users’ funds on the AirDAO blockchain or exchanges, and the AirDAO multisig is also unaffected.” AirDAO

In a bid to expedite the recovery process, AirDAO has offered the hacker a white hat hacking fee of 10% if the stolen funds, totaling nearly $870,000, are returned promptly. However, if cooperation is not forthcoming, the team has stated its intention to involve law enforcement. The AirDAO team noted it is “working with exchanges and relevant authorities to identify the hacker and retrieve all stolen funds.”

According to data from PeckShield, the stolen funds have been transferred to various centralized exchanges, including MEXC, KuCoin, and ChangeNOW. Analysts at SlowMist added that some part of the stolen funds also went to Binance and BitMart. At the time of reporting, these platforms had not issued public statements regarding the incident.

Founded in 2022, AirDAO positions itself as a community-governed blockchain and ecosystem of web3 decentralized applications powered by its blockchain network called AMB-NET and its native token, AMB.