Hackers stole $322 million cryptocurrency from the Wormhole Cyberattack
John Greenwood
Posted On February 3, 2022
Hackers have exploited a vulnerability to breach the Wormhole cryptocurrency platform and stole $322 million worth of Ether.
The Wormhole Cyberattack incident happened earlier today and has affected Wormhole Portal, a web-based application called as Blockchain bridge, which allows users to convert cryptocurrency from one form to another. The portal employs smart contracts on Ethereum Blockchain to convert one currency to an internal token, which is later converted into another cryptocurrency.
Breaking Down Wormhole Cyberattack
The hackers have exploited the process of currency conversion to manipulate the Wormhole platform making it release excessive Ether(ETH) and Solana(SOL) coins. As per the reports, the attacker has stolen cryptocurrency worth $332.8 million, and have depreciated $294 million because of price fluctuations following news of the hack. As of now there aren’t any details from Wormhole about the incident except a confirmation of the attack but the site is seen in the maintenance mode when this article was written.
Similar attack was seen on another blockchain bridge where threat actors stole $80 million from Qubit France. Another attack targeted Crypto when $300 million was stolen by bypassing two-factor authentication. When Wormhole confirms the amount of funds stolen, this attack will become the largest cryptocurrency hack of this year and second largest hack of decentralized finance platform of all time as per the compiled by the DeFiYield project.
‼️ The wormhole network is down for maintenance as we look into a potential exploit.
— Wormhole🌪 (@wormholecrypto) February 2, 2022
📢 We will provide updates here as soon as we have them.
🙏 Thank you for your patience.
How is Wormhole trying to handle the incident
Tal Be’ery, CTO of ZenGo, a cryptocurrency wallet app mentioned that Wormhole is trying to contact the hackers requesting them to return the stolen funds for $10 million reward as bug bounty. However, as per Uber executive’s statement, these sort of White-hat contract isn’t legal and thus authorities can still charge attackers for their act.
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