Galxe replacing 110% of funds users lost in recent front-end hack, over $400K

The platform was the victim of a phishing scam that routed users to a website that drained their wallets after they approved a transaction.

Galxe is making users whole by 110% if they lost funds in a recent hack, the firm announced on Oct. 10. “We want to express our deepest gratitude to those who are standing by us during this difficult time,” the company said.

Users’ funds will be automatically returned on Oct. 16 to the wallet addresses they were taken from unless they request other handling. The affected users will be paid in Tether (USDT) with the value calculated as of 10:00 UTC Oct. 9.

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Users who authenticated transactions on a phishing site on Oct. 6 were affected, Galxe said in a letter to users. The hack lasted just over five hours.

In a preliminary estimate dated Oct. 10, over $396,000 of losses were recorded, in amounts ranging from over $53,000 to just pennies. The company had estimated earlier that around 1,120 users were affected by hack.

Related: Crypto suffered 153% YoY increase in hacks and scams in Q3: Immunefi

Platform co-founder Charles Wayn told Cointelegraph in a written response that Galxe is working with two security firms to track down the hacked funds. In addition, it has improved its domain name service security settings, changed its domain provider and is conducting security audits. Wayn said:

“The incident was mainly caused by [domain registrar] Dynadot resetting our account information and granting permission to an impersonator who provided fake documentation claiming to be an authorized member of Galxe.”

The Galxe protocol is a permissionless self-sovereign identity infrastructure. Its native GAL token fell from $1.20 to $1.15 on Friday, Oct. 6. It reached $1.21 over the weekend with high trading volume through Saturday morning. It had settled at $1.16 at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko.

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