Scandal at Solana: Third hack in 2022 – this time 320 million gone
It’s the second month of 2022 and Solana is already experiencing its third major setback. On February 2, hackers exploited the network’s wormhole bridge , which connects Solana to Ethereum. The attacker or attackers captured 120,000 wrapped Ethereum tokens, which were worth around $320 million at the time.
The wormhole interoperability protocol assured customers that ETH would be added to ensure the wrapped variant was fully secured on the bridge. At the time of going to press, it was said succinctly that the security gap had been fixed and that work was now being done on optimizing the network functionalities. worked.
Vulnerability Worhole
According to Paradigm security researcher samczsun, the attacker either had access to the bridge’s private keys or hacked them. Then he exploited a vulnerability in minting wETH without having to deposit ETH tokens. Samczsun also noticed a related transaction on Solana where the attacker bypassed ETH.
The Wormhole developers have now made the hacker a price offer for the return of the loot. A message on the Ethereum blockchain reads:
“We found that you managed to exploit Solana VAA verification and mint tokens. We would like to offer you a whitehat agreement and offer you a $10M bug bounty for exploit details and the return of the WETH you minted.”
Tom Robinson, co-founder of blockchain analytics firm Elliptic commented :
“This shows once again that the security of DeFi services has not yet reached the level appropriate to the vast sums of money stored in them. The transparency of the blockchain allows attackers to spot and exploit big flaws.”
Debate on “Ethereum killers”
Already in January, there were two major incidents at Solana, so that there were a total of four outages in six months, three of them this year alone. Some attribute these problems to Solana’s relatively young age. Among them is FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who still believes Solana to be the best blockchain despite the incidents.
In the last eight hours, the SOL price has fallen 12% from around $111 to $97. At press time, the token was trading at $99.03, having also dropped 9.4% over the past few days. And just like many other cryptocurrencies, SOL is currently trading at a 62.5% discount from its Nov. 6 peak of $260.
