The expansion of the blockchain market has paved way for certain innovations and developments in the digital asset industry. However, as more and more people continue to get on board with the concept, the possibilities of cyber-attacks and thefts have majorly increased in the sector. Several blockchain protocols have experienced attacks from hackers that have managed to steal data, funds, and tokens every now and then. A similar incident happened on the Wormhole blockchain.
Wormhole is a popular crypto blockchain bridge that is serving a wide crypto community. Wormhole experienced a hacking attempt on Wednesday. As a result, the blockchain platform lost crypto assets of almost $324 million. The platform confirmed the incident in a series of tweets, admitting that 120k wETH were stolen from the network.
Wormhole network and website crashes upon the hacking attempt
The Wormhole network links different blockchain platforms with each other. It also facilitates the transfer of cryptocurrencies. However, the platform has lost a significant amount of assets with the recent hacking attempt. Also, the network was down for maintenance as the developers of the network looked into a potential fault that caused the incident.
The platform’s website was also down as it has “Portal is Temporarily Unavailable” written in block letters. There was no other message on the website. Upon research, it was found out that 80,000 ETH were transferred from Wormhole. Also, another 40,000 ETH were sold by the hackers on Solana. This meant that almost $324 million were sucked out of the platform.
The company behind Wormhole, Certus One, released a message offering $10 million as a bounty for the return of lost assets and the exploit details. The message was shared by Tom Robinson from Elliptic. The company however believes that the Solana VAA verification and mint tokens were exploited by the hackers. But there is no confirmation on this.
By 8 pm EST, the exploitation on the network was fixed and it was restored. However, the hackers were able to mint 120,000 wrapped ETH on the Solana blockchain. Out of these 120,000 wrapped Eth, 93,750 ETH were transferred into the Ethereum blockchain. Several experts and researchers have tried to dig deep into the possibilities that led to the attack.
This recent hacking attempt is a continuation of attacks on DeFi platforms from the last year. It was estimated that around $2.2 million was stolen from DeFi protocols in 2021. Nonetheless, the start of 2022 is also not that promising. The attack on Wormhole is the second-largest reported hack after the Poly Network.
