In what experts termed the fourth biggest hacks ever, Wormhole Portal, a platform that helps users transfer cryptocurrency between the Solana and Ethereum blockchains, announced late Wednesday that a hacker had stolen more than $325 million worth of Ethereum Tokens.
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Blockchain platform Wormhole, launched last August and holds roughly $1 billion in deposited fund of possible of possible hack on Twitter at early ours of today, stating that it’s network was down for maintenance as the firm look into a potential attack.
The wormhole network was exploited for 120k wETH.
— Wormhole (@wormhole) February 2, 2022
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.
In a message embedded onto the Ethereum blockchain, Wormhole offered the attacker a $10 million bounty to return the funds, according to blockchain analytics company Elliptic, which called the Wednesday incident the fourth largest cryptocurrency hack ever.
According to Forbes report, Wormhole revealed that the network’s vulnerability had been “patched”; it’s still unclear who the alleged hacker is and how Wormhole users may have been affected by the heist.
Soon after the attack, analysts at blockchain security firm CertiK said the hack represented the largest-ever attack on the Solana network and an “unfortunate reality” for the booming decentralized finance space, which has heated up among investors alongside the broader cryptocurrency industry over the past year, despite a growing number of similar hacks.
Even though the space only started gaining traction in 2020, there have been more than $2 billion in direct losses suffered by decentralized finance services due to hacks and exploits, according to Elliptic on Wednesday.
$192 billion. That’s the current market value of all decentralized finance tokens, according to cryptodata website DeFi Llama. The figure shot past $250 billion for the first time ever in December but has since fallen amid a broader cryptocurrency market sell-off.
Ethereum President, Vitalik Buterin earlier in January 2022, posted on his blog on Reddit about his reservations on crosschain links and predict this possible out come;
“To understand why bridges have these limitations, we need to look at how various combinations of blockchains and bridging survive 51% attacks. Many people have the mentality that “if a blockchain gets 51% attacked, everything breaks, and so we need to put all our force on preventing a 51% attack from ever happening even once”. I really disagree with this style of thinking; in fact, blockchains maintain many of their guarantees even after a 51% attack, and it’s really important to preserve these guarantees.
For example, suppose that you have 100 ETH on Ethereum, and Ethereum gets 51% attacked, so some transactions get censored and/or reverted. No matter what happens, you still have your 100 ETH. Even a 51% attacker cannot propose a block that takes away your ETH, because such a block would violate the protocol rules and so it would get rejected by the network. Even if 99% of the hashpower or stake wants to take away your ETH, everyone running a node would just follow the chain with the remaining 1%, because only its blocks follow the protocol rules. More generally, if you have an application on Ethereum, then a 51% attack could censor or revert it for some time, but what comes out at the end is a consistent state. If you had 100 ETH, but sold it for 320000 DAI on Uniswap, even if the blockchain gets attacked in some arbitrary crazy way, at the end of the day you still have a sensible outcome – either you keep your 100 ETH or you get your 320000 DAI. The outcome where you get neither (or, for that matter, both) violates protocol rules and so would not get accepted.
Now, imaging what happens if you move 100 ETH onto a bridge on Solana to get 100 Solana-WETH, and then Ethereum gets 51% attacked. The attacker deposited a bunch of their own ETH into Solana-WETH and then reverted that transaction on the Ethereum side as soon as the Solana side confirmed it. The Solana-WETH contract is now no longer fully backed, and perhaps your 100 Solana-WETH is now only worth 60 ETH. Even if there’s a perfect ZK-SNARK-based bridge that fully validates consensus, it’s still vulnerable to theft through 51% attacks like this.
For this reason, it’s always safer to hold Ethereum-native assets on Ethereum or Solana-native assets on Solana than it is to hold Ethereum-native assets on Solana or Solana-native assets on Ethereum”
