Solana ecosystem’s popular AI + DePIN project, io.net, was attacked by hacker @ledrog123 before the airdrop was distributed, resulting in the alteration of front-end data on the official website. Today (29th), Ahmad Shadid, CEO and founder of io.net, addressed this issue on the X platform.
(Previous summary:
AI+Depin popular project “io.net” hacked, official website data altered, $IO airdrop postponed.
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(Supplementary background:
io.net research report: DePIN model solves GPU resource dilemma, can it open a new era of AI applications?
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io.net, the “AI + DePIN” project in the Solana ecosystem, which received a Series A funding of 30 million US dollars, has attracted significant market attention since its launch. Unexpectedly, on April 25th, the io.net official website experienced a malfunction and was hacked by @ledrog123, resulting in the alteration of front-end data. This forced the postponement of the $IO token airdrop. Today (29th), Ahmad Shadid, CEO and founder of io.net, once again addressed this issue in detail.
Ahmad Shadid, who previously worked at Binance, explained why they couldn’t respond immediately to this hacking incident. Ahmad Shadid stated that since io.net announced fundraising and launched the incentive program in early March, the number of GPUs has grown exponentially. Initially, these GPUs were emitting valid signals and the cluster was stable. However, in mid-March, there was a surge of new nodes. As a result, io.net was not prepared to accommodate the rapid growth of GPUs on a large scale.
Ahmad Shadid mentioned that in order to support infrastructure improvements for io.net and in preparation for the release of IO Cloud v2 at the end of April and the upcoming TGE, they hired a new CTO, Gaurav Sharma, who has held important technical positions at renowned companies such as Binance, Amazon, Agoda, and eBay.
Protecting user airdrop rights
The most concerning issue for the community is whether the hackers have affected the airdrop rights. Ahmad Shadid pointed out that during the stabilization of the infrastructure, they began to suspect organized bad actors using various strategies to impersonate workers, which is a Sybil attack (forging nodes on the network). The security team started identifying the different tactics used by fake workers and developed countermeasures to identify and remove them, thus permanently preventing their connection to the network.
Recently, community members have reported these impersonators selling virtualized GPUs and other services aimed at manipulating the io.net reward program within the network. Ten days ago, the io.net team also discovered a significant increase in the number of fake GPUs attempting to connect to the network, reaching approximately 1.8 million. In response to this situation, the team has prioritized identifying and blocking these devices. Therefore, Ahmad Shadid promises to protect the rights of each user, especially in terms of fairness in the airdrop reward program.
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