AIXBT autonomous agent drained of 55.5 ETH via two malicious prompts queued through its dashboard
AIXBT (Virtuals Protocol) · Mar 18, 2025 · Trading agent
What happened
An attacker compromised the secure dashboard of AIXBT, an autonomous crypto-market agent on Virtuals Protocol, at 02:00 UTC on March 18, 2025, and queued two fraudulent prompts into its autonomous response system. The agent executed them, transferring 55.5 ETH (roughly $107,000 at the time) from its Simulacrum wallet on Base to the attacker's address. The AIXBT token fell about 20% on the news.
Causal vector
Compromise of the agent's operator dashboard — the control plane that can inject prompts directly into the autonomous execution loop
Source
Reported by Decrypt. Verified against the primary report.
The agent's wallet executed a transfer because a privileged channel told it to — no policy layer sat between the prompt queue and the money. An external spend policy with a destination allowlist would have BLOCKED a 55.5 ETH transfer to a brand-new address regardless of who queued the prompt.
The six rule types that contain this class of failure
Per-transaction cap
Any single spend above your ceiling is BLOCKED before it moves.
Daily total
Cumulative spend across all agent calls, bounded per day.
Velocity limit
Stops runaway retry loops — the #1 cause of overnight losses.
Merchant allowlist
Only approved destinations can ever receive funds.
Category rules
Flag high-risk classes (crypto, infra, refunds) for review.
Approval threshold
Above a value, the action waits for a human.
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