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Frax Finance Says its Domain Name Hijacking Has Been Resolved

Frax's founder Sam Kazemian says the Frax websites are safe to use, and the domain registrar is investigating what happened.

Updated Nov 1, 2023, 6:02 a.m. Published Nov 1, 2023, 4:23 a.m.
A hacker (Azamat E/Unsplash)
A hacker (Azamat E/Unsplash)

Decentralized cross-chain protocol Frax Finance's domain was hijacked early Wednesday, but the team behind the project has gotten it back under their control with help from their domain registrar.

"Name.com has reached out to us and confirmed [the domains] are now routed back to their proper DNS under our control. We’ve been told they will let us know what led to the incident after they conduct a full investigation tomorrow," the project posted on X.

Domain Name System (DNS) hijacking occurs when the domain name registrar redirects users to a malicious site that looks exactly like the authentic one to phish users into giving up their credentials.

This type of attack is increasingly common in crypto. In 2022, the decentralized finance (DeFi) project Convex Finance had to set up new website addresses after its original URLs were taken over and misdirected users to malicious sites.

So far, no user funds have been stolen by the attacker.

Earlier, Kazemian told CoinDesk that his team is in the dark about what happened, and it doesn’t seem to be a compromised email or password.

"It doesn’t seem like we did anything wrong at all. So until they tell us the account is secure, it’s not possible for us to say it’s safe," Kazemian said.

Name.com hasn’t responded to a request for comment from CoinDesk but told Kazemian and the Frax team that they'll be conducting a full investigation into what exactly happened.

UPDATE (Nov. 1, 06:01 UTC): Updates with statement from Frax.

Sam Reynolds

Sam Reynolds is a senior reporter based in Taipei. Sam was part of the CoinDesk team that won the 2023 Gerald Loeb award in the breaking news category for coverage of FTX's collapse. Prior to CoinDesk, he was a reporter with Blockworks and a semiconductor analyst with IDC.

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