$2.25M Stolen in Coordinated Attack on Fetch.ai, NuNet, and SingularityNET

A coordinated attack on three interconnected AI-crypto projects—Fetch.ai, NuNet, and SingularityNET—occurred on September 19, resulting in the theft of around $2.25 million and the minting of billions of counterfeit tokens. This breach, attributed to a single compromised set of privileged signing keys, has sent the prices of the affected tokens into a downward spiral.

The attacker initially siphoned off approximately 8.72 million FET tokens from Fetch.ai's TokenConversionManagerV3 contract, using a valid signature call. Following this, they exploited a compromised deployer account to mint around 408.5 million unauthorized NTX tokens. The minting spree continued with hundreds of millions of additional AGIX and WMTx tokens, bringing the total volume of newly created tokens to roughly 2.3 billion across multiple assets.

While the realized profits from actual token sales were between $2 million and $2.25 million—primarily from converting FET tokens into ETH—the potential unrealized gains for the attacker peaked at approximately $17 million, according to PeckShield. This figure included around 198 million AGIX tokens and various other assets.

The attack has had a devastating impact on the token prices, with NTX experiencing a collapse of between 65% and over 90%. In contrast, FET, being the largest token by market cap among the three, saw more moderate declines. Security firms Blockaid, PeckShield, and Bitquery traced the malicious activity back to a singular attacker cluster, emphasizing the role of compromised privileged keys in the exploit.

In response, all three projects have paused related operations, deactivated vulnerable keys, and shut down affected contracts. The ongoing investigation indicates that some wallets associated with the attacker remain unprotected, raising concerns about potential further losses.