Popular cross-chain liquidity exchange THORChain has been hit by another exploit, this time costing around $8 million, suffering a second security breach in two weeks.
After the hack, THORChain tweeted that it suffered a “sophisticated attack” on its ETH router where nearly $8 million were stolen from them.
“THORChain has suffered a sophisticated attack on the ETH Router, around $8m. Hacker deliberately limited their impact, seemingly a Whitehat. ETH will be halted until it can be peer-reviewed with audit partners, as a priority. LPs in the ERC-20 pools will be subsidized,” THORChain tweeted.
The ETH router controls the movement of Ethereum-based tokens through THORChain cross-chain decentralized exchange.
“The Whitehat requested a 10% bounty – which will be awarded if they reach out, and they should be encouraged to do so.”
Threat actors warned that they discovered “multiple critical issues” and could have struck much greater damage, such as embezzling large amounts of Bitcoin, Binance Coin, Lycan coin, and many other cryptocurrencies.
Just seven days ago, THORChain suffered another multi-million security breach. The loss was
estimated at about 13,000 ETH (around $25 million). Later, however, this was revised on Twitter, with the project claiming, “At this stage, the estimate is around ~4000 ETH worth of assets (ETH/ERC20) was taken, not 13k ETH. More detailed assessment and recovery steps will be announced soon. The users who suffered (LPs) will be made whole in the coming weeks.”
Following last week’s hack, THORChain said it had been audited by multiple blockchain security companies to discover vulnerabilities in a given network. The DeFi protocol promised that the treasury has the necessary funds to compensate all victims and asked for the hackers to get in touch.
“While the treasury has the funds to cover the stolen amount, we request the attacker get in contact with the team to discuss the return of funds and a bounty commensurate with the discovery,” THORChain added.
THORChain, now with a market worth of $841 million, was founded in 2018 and is a decentralized liquidity protocol that allows for swapping native assets between different blockchains. The cross-chain decentralized exchange would restart its network, donate funds back into the ETH pool to restore the lost funds, release the automatic-solvency checker, and work with security firms to audit.