Syndicate: The security incident originated from the leakage of private keys, leading to the malicious upgrade of the bridging contract, resulting in a total loss of $380,000

Syndicate has released an update regarding the recent security incident, stating that the leakage of private keys led to the malicious upgrade of bridging contracts on two chains, resulting in the theft of approximately 18.5 million SYND (about $330,000) and around $50,000 in customer tokens. Affected users will receive full compensation, and SYND holders will receive additional compensation.

The attack involved multi-stage reconnaissance, infrastructure mapping, vulnerability exploitation development, and precise timing, ruling out the possibility of insider involvement. The root cause of the vulnerability was the storage of private keys in a password manager, and the upgrade process did not utilize multi-signature or hardware signing. Syndicate is strengthening security measures, including adding an encryption layer outside the password manager and implementing multi-signature or hardware signing for the upgrade path.