News·Opentensor Blog·Jul 3, 2024, 18:55 UTC

Bittensor Community Update — July 3, 2024

Bittensor Community, Contributors, and TAO Holders, Yesterday at 7:41 PM UTC, we took the decision to place the Opentensor Chain Validators behind a firewall and entered safe-mode on Subtensor due to an attack that affected multiple participants in the Bittensor community. Over the past 24 hours, our team has been working tirelessly to understand, triage and tackle this issue. Below is a detailed assessment of the attack, mitigations, and what steps the Opentensor Foundation (OTF) has been taking to remedy and prevent this from happening again. Attack Timeline Attack begins (July 2, 7:06 PM UTC) — Attacker begins to transfer funds out of wallets into their own wallet. Attack detected (July 2, 7:25 PM UTC) — OTF detects an abnormality in transfer volume and starts a war room. Attack neutralized (July 2, 7:41 PM UTC) — Opentensor chain validators were placed behind a firewall and safe mode subsequently activated to prevent any nodes from connecting to the chain and thus stopping all transactions and allowing for a full situational analysis of the attack. Root cause of attack The attack was traced back to the PyPi Package Manager version 6.12.2, where a malicious package was uploaded, compromising user security. The malicious package, masquerading as a legitimate Bittensor package, contained code designed to steal unencrypted coldkey details. When users downloaded this package and decrypted their coldkeys, the decrypted bytecode was sent to a remote server controlled by the attacker. Affected participants It is likely that this vulnerability affected the following: Anyone using Bittensor 6.12.2 and did an operation involving the decryption of either hotkeys or coldkeys. Those who downloaded the Bittensor PyPi package between May 22 7:14 PM UTC and May 29 6:47 PM UTC and then performed any of the below operations. Those who used Bittensor==6.12.2 and then performed any of the below operations. Operations btcli stake addbtcli stake removebtcli wallet transferbtcli root d

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