Mysten Labs of Sui Blockchain Hacked on Discord

Sui blockchain designers Mysten Labs is the latest blockchain firm to face a crypto hack. The firm has announced that its Discord server has been hacked.

The blockchain company has warned people not to click any links posted on the server in the eight hours prior to its Twitter announcement and said that the team is working to fix the mess.

An unverified screenshot shared on Twitter stated that hackers had put a link of a rumoured crypto airdrop on the announcement channel in the server. Mysten Labs made such an announcement on Saturday, and so far, no other further updates have been published.

Sui blockchain, a permissionless proof-stake blockchain, is the first product offered by Mysten Labs, launched in March this year. 

Mysten Labs, a web3 infrastructure firm, was established by Evan Cheng, Sam Blackshear, Adeniyi Abiodun, and George Danezis, four former developers from Meta's once-ambitious cryptocurrency project Novi. In the past, the four specialists were involved in the development of the Diem blockchain and its Move programming language.

Last December, Mysten Labs raised a $36 million funding round participated by high-profile investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures. Last month, Mysten Labs announced that it was targeting a $2 billion valuation.

 $1.4 Billion Stolen This Year Through Breaches

This year, hacks and scams have hit crypto investors hard. Cybercriminals have so far found a particularly useful avenue – blockchain bridges – to siphon customers' funds.

Blockchain bridges, which normally connect networks to enable the fast swaps of tokens, are getting increasing popularity as a way for crypto users to do transactions. Thanks to blockchain bridge technology, crypto users are bypassing centralized exchanges.

However, since the beginning of this year, a total of about $1.4 billion has been lost through breaches on such cross-chain bridges. According to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, the bridge exploits are happening at a striking rate as they are a new phenomenon.

In February, Wormhole, one of the most popular bridges linking the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, was hit by a hack that stole around $320 million.

In June, hackers stole $100 million in cryptocurrency from Horizon, a so-called blockchain bridge developed by crypto start-up Harmony.

Early this month, hackers stole almost $200 million from Nomad, a bridge protocol for transferring crypto tokens across different blockchains.