Blockchain Platform Wormhole Loses Over $320m to Hack

Hackers have stolen over $320 million worth of cryptocurrency assets from Wormhole, the platform confirmed on Wednesday.

The Breach

Blockchain bridge Wormhole has been exploited for roughly $324 million in wrapped Ethereum. 

The team behind Wormhole had posted a tweet on Wednesday announcing that it had “shut down for maintenance.” An hour, it added an update, revealing that the network lost 120,000 wETH to a security breach. 

In an effort to assuage the community, the platform added that it would increase its ETH supply to fully back wETH.

The wormhole network was exploited for 120k wETH.

ETH will be added over the next hours to ensure wETH is backed 1:1. More details to come shortly.

We are working to get the network back up quickly. Thanks for your patience.

— Wormhole🌪 (@wormholecrypto) February 2, 2022

So far, Wormhole has not given any details as to how it will replenish the supply.

The platform acts as a token bridge to allow users to send and receive cryptocurrency between Solana, Ethereum, and other tokens. Thanks to it, those users don’t need a centralized crypto exchange. 

According to Coin Telegraph, the hacker redeemed 93,750 wETH for Ethereum worth $254 million. From there, they proceeded to buy up a host of other coins and NFTs, including SportX and Bored Ape Yacht Club.

In a further tweet, Wormhole said that “the vulnerability has been patched.”

The vulnerability has been patched.

We are working to get the network back up as soon as possible.

— Wormhole🌪 (@wormholecrypto) February 3, 2022

High Up the Blockchain Hack Leaderboard  

Wormhole’s hack is one of the heaviest crypto heists of all time and second largest from a DeFi platform. It is the largest so far in 2022, coming just a week after hackers stole $80 million from Quibit, another cross-chain bridge.

According to Tom Robinson, co-founder of blockchain analysis company Elliptic:

“This demonstrates once again that the security of DeFi services has not reached a level this is apropriate fo the huge sums being stored within them. The transparency of the blockchain is allowing attackers to identify and exploit major bugs.”

Wormhole developers Certus One has offered the hacker a $10 million bounty to turn in the stolen funds.