One of the crypto bridge networks that link the Solana blockchains and Ethereum has experienced a massive hack with an estimation of $320 million as of Wednesday, February 2.
Wormhole has talked about the event via its Twitter handle making mention that the hackers were able to acquire a staggering 120K wrapped Ether (wETH). The post on Twitter shows that the Wormhole network had been exploited of wETH worth 120K. ETH would be inputted over the following hours to make sure wETH is back on 1:1.
They had said that more details would be conveyed in a short while, as work is being done to restore the network quickly and further went on to thank users for their patience. This is again another significant hack on the DeFi space portraying the vulnerability of the cross-chain DeFi bridges.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Dr Tom Robinson, the co-founder of blockchain analysis industry, Elliptic,he said that this event once more shows that the level of security of DeFi services has not gotten to a point that is adequate for the large sums stored in them.
Attackers find it easy to identify and take advantage of major bugs due to the transparency of blockchain. The attack had taken place in the early hours of the day and affected Wormhole’s Portal which is a web focused application, also referred to as blockchain bridge which permits users to turn one form of cryptocurrency to another.
Bridge Portals make use of “smart contracts” present on the Ethereum blockchain to make conversions of an inputted cryptocurrency to a temporary internal token which eventually gets converted into the desired output cryptocurrency of the user.
It is believed that the attacker exploited the process in order to manipulate the Wormhole project into releasing Ether (ETH) as well as Solana (SOL) coins more than the input they provided initially. Immediately after the hack, Wormhole has brought down the network for maintenance purposes.
They made mention of the vulnerability being patched on their recent update. They said they are putting things together in order to get the network running as soon as possible.
Also, some players in the markets have brought to notice a transaction with a value of 80,000 ETH that was carried out of a Wormhole address to another address already holding $250 million worth of ETH.
In accordance to the news, Ether (ETH) has gone down by 5% while Solana has dived more than 12% to return back under $100.
Wormhole Attempts To Fix The Damage
Developers at Wormhole are trying to get across to the hacker, offering a $10 million bug bounty. Although, it presently leaves all users, other stakeholders and DeFi protocols using Wormhole at the hands of the hacker.
Tal Be’ery, CTO at cryptocurrency wallet app ZenGo made mention that, just like in the case of Qubit hack, Wormhole is currently making appeals to the perpetrators and pleading with them to bring back funds that were stolen in return for a $10 million reward as well as a “white hat contract” which most likely signifies that the platform wouldn’t involve the lawsuits in the matter.
The Jump Trading Group purchased Wormhole developer Certus One as at last year in August 2021. Certus one has posed as a major infrastructure supplier for PoS blockchain networks with inclusion of some major names such as Terra, cosmos, Ethereum 2.0 and Solana.
Although, at the beginning of the year, Founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin had spotted out the vulnerability of the cross-chain bridges. Just a week ago, similar exploitation took place with another blockchain bridge, when fraudsters whisked $80 million from the Qubit finance platform.