When the morning sun rose on a peaceful day in the crypto community, the world of decentralized finance was brought into the realm of hackers and scammers to deal with the problem of Pendle Finance, which was among the biggest characters in the sector of decentralized finance. Pendle Finance’s staff witnessed a sudden logout from all their Twitter devices (account “@pendle_fi”) – the occurrence of the worst possible scenario for their project. This article is pinning down the step of events, the teamworks for resolutions as well as implications of that for future digital protection.
Uncovering the Breach
The event occurred on March 30th, at around 1 am UTC time, when the team from Pendle Finance noticed that they had been locked out of their Twitter account randomly (@pendle_fi). The answers to the security questions were also changed and I could not do password reset as the email address on the record had been altered. Moreover, the latter circumstance aroused the investigators’ suspicions as they couldn’t find any obvious break-in signs. The account was protected by 2FA that did not link with phones. This advanced the problem probably why it case became so complicated.
In response, Pendle Finance performed a through negligence prevention protocol by looking into all external accounts and login credentials, such as password manager, email accounts, 2FA, and others. This all-round check showed up point blank that there was nothing short by that measure. Listen to the given audio and repeat the given sentence. While that procedure took some time, the account hadn’t been recovered, making us publishing a public service announcement (PSA) through some other channels and finally contacting Twitter directly.
Mobilizing a Community Response
Fully understanding the dire situation, Pendle Finance made haste in contacting the members of its network and soliciting from them the aid of spreading awareness about the breach all across the nation. Communication promotion of that strategy actually made a lot of heads that were unconnected to the staging process nod in agreement along the entire process. Firstly, the team managed to get in touch with a Twitter official who was very helpful and was ready to assist them as they responded to the request of the collective party.
The cyber criminals gained assurance of the @pendle_fi account thereby producing a fake airdrop warning that contained a fake link. Thus, they intended the message to the begining of their disturbing acts; however, it also symbolized a starting shift of the reaction towards them. In a multifaceted approach, Pendle Finance was able to get the help of Twitter officials and third-party experts to put the @pendle_fi account in lockdown, and then, flagged out the spam messages as spamming ones.
This quick action solved the issue and helped the account to be rebooted within 2 hours from the moment it was not accessible. A great virtue of the squad was the ability to act rapidly and interact with out-of-house participants that helped minimize the effects of the negative backlash and re-established the brand’s image online.
Investigating the intrusion
Pendle Finance along with Twitter commenced broad analysis of methods used by the attackers to dig out the hidden truths. The initial investigations expose that the scammers might have set up a deceptive online identity that portrayed themselves as an entity of Pendle in order to carry out a password reset of the targeted system which explains the usage of social engineering skills that are usually involved in digital hacks.
The investigation, however, is a continuous process and the administration of Pendle Finance has assured that the public be kept well informed of new developments to promote a full understanding and security awareness within the community. Incident has also brought forward the community support and collaboration which is the vital tool during the cyber threat management process. A special mention was made to Mike Silagadze, ZachXBT, and _0xbe1 who were instrumental in the resolution of the crisis. They are truly the individuals behind the scenes that enable us to serve our community.
Conclusion
The security crisis with Pendle Finance is a strong indication that these mayhem won’t go away even if you are engaged in the digital finance business. Although the banks’ and the financial systems’ defenses are very strong, the hackers’ intelligence is yet a problem. Yet there was a kind of community solidarity and a quick, collaborate action promoted during the restoration of the @pendle_fi account. This can be taken as evidence that community solidarity matters and a rapid, collaborative response strategy is effective.
