Banana Gun team investigates reports of user wallets being drained, Telegram bot offline
Quick Take
- Some Banana Gun user wallets have reportedly been compromised, with funds being drained.
- The team said it is investigating the issue and the Telegram bot has been taken offline.
- It later suggested the issue stemmed from a front-end vulnerability and only a small number of users were affected.
Wallets connected with the Telegram bot Banana Gun have been compromised according to several community reports, with at least some users’ funds being drained.
“We are investigating the issue, bot is currently offline,” the Banana Gun team wrote in a pinned message on its official Telegram channel.
“Seems like there are already 36 victims with almost 563 ETH ($1.4 million) stolen 'so far' on mainnet,” community member yannickcrypto.eth posted on X. “I wouldn't say that Banana Gun itself got hacked, not enough victims.”
In an update posted to X later on Thursday, Banana Gun confirmed that some users had witnessed "unauthorized transfers" from their wallets, prompting the team to switch off the bot, but said its back-end systems were not compromised.
"Only a very small number of users (fewer than 10) were affected. Additionally, the transfers appear to have been executed manually. This leads us to believe the issue may stem from a front-end vulnerability," the project said.
While the Banana Gun team continues to analyze the root cause, it said the Telegram bot would remain offline and welcomed any information that could aid the investigation.
"Being that Banana Gun is an automated Telegram bot that performs on-chain actions for crypto traders, it is necessary to provide your private keys in order to actually have it automate these transactions," Steven Walbroehl, co-founder and CTO of blockchain security firm Halborn, told The Block.
"Giving up your private key is always the biggest risk you can take with anything related to crypto wallets. And the fact that it is a bot that may not react to any suspicious activity done on behalf of user accounts, this makes it even more dangerous, and can lead to issues like we just witnessed," Walbroehl added.
What is Banana Gun?
Banana Gun operates a Telegram-based trading bot that enables users to execute on-chain transactions and snipe upcoming token launches.
The platform is one of the industry’s leading Telegram-based trading bots, according to its Dune Analytics dashboard, having enabled $6 billion worth of trading volume from nearly 272,000 users.
It’s not the first time the project has encountered issues, however, with a botched launch of the revenue-sharing Banana token last September following a bug in its contract.
Updated with comment from Banana Gun and Halborn.
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