A threat actor abused a vulnerability in the Wormhole cryptocurrency platform to steal $322 million worth of Ether currency.
Wormhole Portal, a web-based application—also known as a blockchain "bridge"—that enables users to change one type of bitcoin into another, was the target of the attack earlier.
Bridge portals transform an input cryptocurrency into a temporary internal token, which they then turn into the user's preferred output cryptocurrency using "smart contracts" on the Ethereum blockchain.
The attacker is suspected to have taken advantage of this method to deceive the Wormhole project into releasing significantly more Ether (ETH) and Solana (SOL) tokens than they originally provided.
The attacker allegedly stole crypto-assets worth $322.8 million at the time of the attack, according to reports.
As per reports, the attacker acquired crypto-assets worth $322.8 million at the time of the incident, which have since depreciated to $294 million due to price swings since the breach became public.
While a Wormhole official is yet to respond to a request for comment on today's incident. The firm verified the incident on Twitter and put its site on maintenance while it investigates.
The Wormhole attack is part of a recent pattern of abusing [blockchain] bridges, according to Tal Be'ery, CTO of bitcoin wallet app ZenGo who informed The Record about the Wormhole Attack.
A hacker stole $80 million from Qubit Finance just a week ago, in a similar attack against another blockchain bridge.
As per data compiled by the DeFiYield project, if Wormhole officially acknowledges the number of stolen funds, the incident will likely become the biggest hack of a cryptocurrency platform so far this year, and the second-largest hack of a decentralised finance (DeFi) platform of all time.
Wormhole offered a $10 million "bug bounty" to a hacker.
Be'ery pointed out that, similar to the Qubit hack, Wormhole is now appealing to the attacker to return the stolen funds in return for a $10 million reward and a "whitehat contract," which indicates that the platform will most likely not file any criminal complaints against the attacker.
As per Wormhole's most recent Twitter update, posted on Thursday, February 3, the vulnerability has been fixed. However, as one former Uber executive discovered, such contracts exonerating hackers are illegal in some areas, and authorities may still investigate the hacker.
