A new strain of ransomware has emerged as the latest danger to the Solana network and investors in its SOL currency.
Malware has targeted Phantom wallet users in an effort to get them to apply for an upgrade. Recent reports indicate that rogue actors are airdropping NFTs to Solana wallet users under the guise of security notifications for a new Phantom upgrade. The installation of data-stealing software might lead to the theft of cryptocurrency wallets.
Solana users have been receiving NFTs with the titles ‘PHANTOMUPDATE.COM’ for many weeks. Due to hackers attacking the Solana network, failure to upgrade might result in a hacked machine or crypto theft.
If the link is clicked, malicious files are downloaded and installed on the computer or mobile device in an effort to steal passwords, browser data, and crypto security keys. MarsStealer was recognized as the malware strain that debuted in 2020 on Russian hacker forums.
Not for the first time, Solana wallets have been the subject of an attack. In August, it was believed that the Luca Stealer virus was employed in the assault that drained $4 million from more than 9,200 Solana hot wallets owing to a vulnerability.
In addition, malware is not the only issue facing Solana, as network failures and reduced performance persist. An outage lasting at least six hours left the network inoperable on October 1, killing the once-promised “Ethereum killer.” This outage was attributed to a misconfigured node that generated an irreparable network partition.
As of press time, Solana’s status dashboard says that the mainnet cluster is “currently experiencing decreased performance,” indicating that things are not operating normally.
This year, Solana has experienced outages, network instability, or reduced performance in January, April, March, May, June, and October.
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