Hacker stole $326 million from the Wormhole internetwork protocol, but the parent company of the project immediately compensated for the damage

The attacker found a security loophole in the blockchain bridge between Ethereum and Solana, which allowed him to embezzle 120,000 ETH.

The hacker took advantage of the fact that the Wormhole does notduly registered accounts were verified by starting to create fake custodian account signatures to arbitrarily issue wrapped ether tokens (wETH) on the Solana blockchain. Usually, this requires blocking the appropriate amount of the underlying asset, which is necessary to maintain the network balance.

The attacker thus created 120,000 ETH onmore than $320 million and transferred most of the funds to the Ethereum network or exchanged wrapped tokens for other cryptocurrencies. As a result, the equivalent amount of Ether reserved by DeFi users in Solana became unsecured.

The hack could have wreaked havoc on the platforms and disrupted multiple smart contracts, rendering them insolvent, but this did not happen thanks to the prompt intervention of Jump Trading, the parent company of the cross-chain protocol.A short time after the incident, the owner of the bridge topped up his ETH balance, restoring its operation.

Upon learning about the hack, the project team offered the attacker a reward of $10 million for the returnstolen funds.

It seems that hackers have switched from cryptocurrency blockchains to protocols in the field of decentralized finance, which are gaining popularity.Just last week, we reported on a bug in the code of the Qubit Finance platform, which allowed an attacker to steal $80 million from loan pools.

</p>