​Experts warn of the threat of losing money when participating in Arbitrum’s airdrop

What’s new? Arkham Intelligence, a blockchain intelligence company, said that participants in the airdrop of native tokens of the Arbitrum (ARB) network, scheduled for March 23, are at risk of losing their funds. Thus, the experts recorded suspicious activity on the network and noted that an unknown hacker can implement a scheme to automatically redirect funds to his address using a smart contract. Earlier it became known that more than 625 000 addresses can claim to participate in the airdrop of ARB.

gmA reported hacker on Arbitrum has been sending money over the past 12 hours to around 2400 presumably compromised wallets.These wallets then approve the ARB token in anticipation of receiving the airdrop.address - 0x59d4087f3ff91da6a492b596cbde7140c34afb19Stay safe!

— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) March 20, 2023

Arbitrum is a Layer 2 (L2) network for scaling the Ethereum blockchain, developed by Offchain Labs. It uses Optimistic Rollup technology to aggregate large packets of off-network transactions from Ethereum smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps) before sending them to Ethereum.

What else is known? Arkham said that a hacker has been sending money to 2400 compromised wallets allowed to participate in the ARB airdrop over 12 hours on March 20. As Arbitrum'’ developers previously reported, the number of ARB that admitted users will receive depends on their online activity in February.

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In total, about 0,01% of the total number of wallets are at risk

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Arkham speculates that the hacker has already gained access to some users’ wallets and makes transactions to confirm the application for participation in the airdrop. Users have been advised to immediately cancel the approval and do a second cancellation if it appears before the airdrop begins. Arkham noted that in this case a hacker can always manually transfer ARB if they have private wallet keys, but they will not be able to use a smart contract to automatically transfer.

What is known about ARB? The asset will be launched on March 23, at which time the network will be converted to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) format. ARB is intended solely for protocol governance. In this, the governance process of the Arbitrum DAO will be self-executing, and votes will allow to directly make changes to the core code.

On the same day, Binance and Huobi exchanges will list ARB.