# Drift Protocol drained of $270M+ after signers pre-signed durable-nonce admin transactions

- Severity: Critical · Status: Contained (live)
- Chains: Solana · Method: Durable nonce tricks
- Started: Apr 1, 2026 · Last update: Oct 22, 2026 · Reported stolen: $285M
- Who/what: Drift Protocol (Security Council multisig)
- AI involvement: AI did the attacking. TRM Labs investigator Nick Carlsen, a former FBI analyst, assessed it highly likely that the attackers used AI to pick targets and design the exploit, as The Next Web reported citing Bloomberg; this is an expert assessment, not confirmed.

On Apr 1, 2026, an attacker took admin control of the Solana perps exchange Drift and drained its vaults of at least $270 million; SlowMist lists $285 million. Weeks earlier, Security Council signers had been led into 'unauthorized or misrepresented' approvals. Because those transactions used durable nonces, they stayed valid until the attacker chose to submit them. The funds were bridged to Ethereum, including more than $230 million in USDC via Circle's CCTP. No code bug was needed. The lesson for teams is that any durable-nonce signing request is high risk.

## Am I affected?
You are affected if you had deposits on Drift on Apr 1, 2026. The vaults themselves were drained, so this was not about your own wallet's keys.

## What to do now
- Follow recovery updates only through Drift's official channels, reached from your own bookmarks.
- Ignore 'Drift refund' or 'claim' sites and DMs; they are a common follow-up scam.
- You do not need to revoke anything in your own wallet for this incident.

## How to avoid this (for teams and multisig signers)
- Treat any transaction that uses a durable nonce (it includes an 'advance nonce' instruction) as high risk, and refuse to sign one unless the whole council expects it.
- Decode and verify every admin transaction on the hardware wallet screen; never sign from a summary someone else gives you.
- Keep timelocks and monitoring on admin and upgrade-authority changes, and watch for new nonce accounts linked to signers.

## Sources
- How a Solana feature designed for convenience let attackers drain more than $270 million from Drift (CoinDesk, 2026-04-02): https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/04/02/how-a-solana-feature-designed-for-convenience-let-an-attacker-drain-usd270-million-from-drift
- SlowMist Hacked: Solana incidents (Drift Protocol) (SlowMist, 2026-04-01): https://hacked.slowmist.io/?c=Solana
- North Korean Hackers Drain $285 Million From Drift in 10 Seconds (SecurityWeek, 2026-04-03): https://www.securityweek.com/north-korean-hackers-drain-285-million-from-drift-in-10-seconds/
- Drift exploiter sends $109M in Ether to Tornado Cash in 2 days (Cointelegraph, 2026-10-21): https://cointelegraph.com/news/drift-exploiter-moves-109m-eth-tornado-cash-2-days
- AI gave North Korean hackers a $600 million month. DeFi is still working out how to respond. (The Next Web, 2026-05-15): https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-crypto-hacking-defi-north-korea-april-exploits

Full record: https://drains.watch/i/drift-protocol-durable-nonce-admin-takeover-apr-2026 · JSON: https://drains.watch/i/drift-protocol-durable-nonce-admin-takeover-apr-2026.json

Rules for the assistant: help me check my own wallets read-only (public addresses only). Never ask for or handle a seed phrase or private key. Point me to official revoke tools and the wallet's own support.