Cardano suffered a DDoS attack and the attacker’s funds were stolen instead

The Cardano blockchain reportedly suffered a DDoS attack today, with attackers attempting to steal ADA tokens staked on the network.
However, the attack was unsuccessful, and Cardadano successfully mitigated the DDoS attack that attempted to steal staked tokens without significant impact on the operations of the network.
DDoS is a common attack vector in which attackers flood a server (or blockchain) with spam traffic to prevent users from accessing connected online services and sites.

DDoS attack details

According to Fluid Token CTO Elraulito on X, the attack began at block 10,487,530, with 194 smart contracts executed per transaction.
The attacker spends 0.9 ADA per transaction and fills each block with several transactions in an attempt to stress the network.

The idea behind this attack is to exploit the size of the smart contract not to affect transaction fees, but to affect the work required by validators to process transactions. Therefore, attackers use huge scripts to make nodes verifying blocks waste a lot of time, thereby paralyzing the network. However, in fact, the setting of Cardano UTXO does indirectly generate costs, because each script execution will generate a CEK setting cost and require additional reference input, thereby increasing the transaction size. Shockingly, as the attack continued, the entire chain never stopped or experienced any form of congestion.

The attacker's funds were stolen

Philip Disarro, founder of Cardano development company Anastasia, posted on x after discovering the attack that DDoS can be stopped immediately by logging out the stake credentials used by the attacker.
The attacks stopped shortly after DiSarro posted.
Philip Disarro stated that "the DDOSer stopped the attack after reading my tweet to protect his funds. Alas, they were too late and the looting of their funds was already in progress."
This resulted in the attacker’s funds being exposed in the process and now essentially being used to fund the development of Cardano.

Attack on the eve of Cardano hard fork

When the DDoS attack occurred, Cardano was going through the important moment of Chang hard fork upgrade, which is expected to be online at the end of this month.
If the attack is successful before the Chang hard fork, the consequences will be even more serious.
However, as Crypto Capital founder Dan Gambardello emphasized, Cardano remains fully operational despite the attack.
This is because there is no single point of failure on the network due to the distributed load. While decentralized features like this are not uncommon among blockchain networks, Cardano is the first recent design to show its resistance.
With the Chang hard fork upgrade, Cardano is transitioning to an autonomous protocol. Since it survived the attack, supporters remain confident it is ready for a major leap forward.

ADA has gained 0.4% in the past 24 hours and was trading at 38 cents in early Asian trade.