Solana’s popular AI + DePIN project, io.net, was attacked by hacker @ledrog123 before the airdrop distribution, resulting in the tampering of the front-end data on the official website. Today (29th), Ahmad Shadid, CEO and founder of io.net, addressed this issue again on the X platform.
(Prior Summary:
AI + Depin Hot Project: io.net’s website data tampered with by hackers, $IO airdrop announced delay)
(Background:
io.net Research Report: Can the DePIN model solve the GPU resource dilemma and open a new era of AI applications?)
io.net, the “AI + DePIN” project in the Solana ecosystem, received a Series A financing of $30 million and has attracted great market attention since its launch. Unexpectedly, on April 25th, the io.net website malfunctioned and was tampered with by hacker @ledrog123, resulting in the delay of the project’s token airdrop for $IO. Today (29th), Ahmad Shadid, CEO and founder of io.net, came forward again to provide a complete explanation of the incident.
Ahmad Shadid, who previously worked at Binance, was hired as the new CTO. He explained why they couldn’t respond promptly to this hacker incident. Ahmad Shadid stated that since io.net announced fundraising and launched incentive programs in early March, the number of GPUs has exponentially increased. Initially, these GPUs were emitting valid signals, and the cluster state was stable. However, in mid-March, a large number of new nodes joined. As a result, io.net was not prepared to accommodate the rapid growth of GPUs on a large scale.
Ahmad Shadid explained that in order to support infrastructure improvements for io.net and to coincide with the launch of IO Cloud v2 at the end of April and the upcoming TGE, they hired Gaurav Sharma as the new CTO. Gaurav Sharma has held important technical positions at well-known companies such as Binance, Amazon, Agoda, and eBay.
Protecting user airdrop rights is the community’s primary concern. Ahmad Shadid pointed out that during the process of stabilizing the infrastructure, they began to suspect organized bad actors using various strategies to impersonate workers, which is a form of Sybil attack (forging nodes on the network). The security team started identifying different methods used by fake workers and developed countermeasures to identify and remove them, thereby permanently preventing them from connecting to the network.
Recently, community members have reported these impersonators selling virtualized GPUs and other services aimed at falsifying GPUs to earn rewards from io.net’s incentive program. 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 prioritized identifying and blocking these devices. Therefore, Ahmad Shadid promised to protect the rights of every user, especially in terms of fairness in the airdrop reward program.
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