Telegram Bot Banana Gun to Refund Victims of $3M Hack

The Telegram-based crypto trading bot Banana Gun has announced it will fully refund the eleven users affected by the $3 million exploit of wallets last week.

On September 19, certain community members highlighted the attack, with Banana Gun confirming that some users had witnessed unauthorized transfers from their wallets. The incident prompted the team to temporarily switch off the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Solana bot to avoid further losses.

Hacker Targeted Seasoned Crypto Traders 

The initial investigation suggested that 36 wallets were affected by the attack, and nearly $2 million worth of Ether (ETH) was lost. However, Banana Gun’s post-mortem report revealed a higher loss value with fewer casualties.

“A total of 11 users were affected, with $3M drained. All impacted users will be fully refunded from the Banana Gun treasury, with no tokens being sold for reimbursements,” the protocol’s team stated.

The team revealed that the hacker targeted seasoned crypto traders and was able to manually transfer ETH from their wallets while the trading bots were in use. The attack affected the EVM and Solana bots, which have separate codebases and operate independently.

Manual unauthorized transfers and in-bot notifications of the transfers led Banana Gun to suspect that the hacker exploited a vulnerability within a Telegram message oracle.

“After a thorough investigation by the Banana Gun development team and outside experts, we identified a potential vulnerability in the Telegram message oracle we use, which may have led to the exploit,” the bot firm said.

After patching the vulnerability, Banana Gun restarted EVM and Solana bots and implemented security measures to prevent further fund drains. The measures include a two-hour transfer delay, two-factor authentication for transfers, and a thorough review of both the back-end and front-end systems.

BANANA Price Sees 12% Surge

Banana Gun’s announcement of full refunds for the hack victims and the team’s swift response has helped restore investor confidence, leading to a sharp increase in the value of its token.

On-chain data from price tracking platform CoinStats shows that BANANA experienced a significant 12% surge in the last 24 hours amid anticipation of a refund, taking its trading price to $41.38 at press time.