- Shiba Inu’s K9 Finance platform offers a $23,000 bounty to hackers who stole $2.4 million from their bridge system.
- The attackers used flash loans to buy tokens and gained control of the network’s validators to drain funds.
K9 Finance, a decentralized finance platform on Shiba Inu’s Shibarium layer-2 network, has offered a 5 Ether bounty of around $23,000 to the hacker who carried out a recent bridge exploit that looted $2.4 million in digital assets.
On Monday, the platform sent an on-chain message to the attacker establishing a 30-day window to claim the bounty offer. The protocol had certain conditions, according to which the bounty would start reducing seven days after the first offer.
“Settlement is atomic when we call recoverKnine(). If you call accept(), we cannot cancel the deal. Code is law,” K9 Finance stated in their message. “Bounty is live. Please, act fast.”
UPDATE 13/09/25
What we know so far about the recent incident 👇
How the exploit was executed:
• The attacker used funds from the bridge hack in the same block as the attack to acquire 4.6M BONE to temporarily gain validator voting power, attempting to do it in one… https://t.co/4Ft1VMxeBv
— Shib (@Shibtoken) September 13, 2025
Attack Details and Security Breach
The bridge infrastructure of Shibarium was the target of the Saturday exploit through a sophisticated attack vector. The hackers obtained unauthorized access to validator signing keys, which undermined the network’s security infrastructure.
The hackers put their scheme into practice by using a flash loan to buy 4.6 million Bone ShibaSwap (BONE) tokens. This purchase enabled them to have majority validator power in the network’s consensus mechanism. Under this control, they had signed fraudulent deals that had routed large amounts of money out of the bridge.
Shiba Inu creator Kaal Dhairya confirmed the team members had informed the relevant authorities about the incident. In spite of the intervention of law enforcement, the development team is also open to negotiating directly with the attacker.
“While we have already contacted the authorities, the team is open to negotiating with the attacker,” Dhairya confirmed in a post.
Security Response and Recovery Measures
After the attack, Shibarium developers took up instant security measures to stop subsequent exploitation. The team halted all stake and unstake operations throughout the platform just in case.
The development team moved stake manager funds to hardware wallets with multisignature security measures. This move will offer better security against such attacks on the treasury services of the platform.
Dhairya emphasized that the primary objectives of the team are to restore network security and protect user assets. The developer established that they cooperated with several security companies to conduct thorough investigations.
Security audit entails partnering with well-established firms in blockchain security, such as Hexens, Seal 911, and PeckShield. These companies focus on the detection of vulnerabilities and enforcing sound security systems for decentralized finance protocols.
The hack led to major price volatility of the tokens related to the Shiba Inu ecosystem. The response to news about the security breach in the market was fast and huge.
Shiba Inu (SHIB) has declined significantly, with its price falling from $0.0000145 on Saturday to around $0.00001303 at the time of writing. This suggests a 5.33% drop in the last 24 hours.
The native token of K9 Finance (KNINE) was even worse hit as it dropped to $0.00000257 against the previous value of $0.00000287. A 10%decline was experienced in the token after the security incident announcement.
ShibaSwap’s BONE was affected the most, dropping by 38% since Sunday. The token price declined from $0.31 to around $0.1878 at the time of writing.
