second month of 2022 and wither (SOL) is already experiencing its third major outage. The latest outage happened yesterday, and hackers staged an attack by exploiting the Wormhole bridge of the network connecting Solana to Ethereum. Hacker(s), valued at approximately $320 million 120,000 wETH seized his token.
Paradigm security researcher “samczsunAccording to “the hacker either had access to the private keys of the bridge or used the bridge. It then exploited a vulnerability in the creation of wETH without having to deposit ETH tokens. Samczsun also noticed a “corresponding transaction in Solana, where the attacker bridges ETH.”
How did the @wormholecrypto exploit work? I joined forces with @gf_256 and @ret2jazzy to reverse engineer the exploit, and now that it’s been patched we can finally share it with you👇 pic.twitter.com/lXwD0GLZ3N
— samczsun (@samczsun) February 3, 2022
Remarkably, the engineering firm Certus One wormhole, after which the platform was acquired by trading firm Jump Trading in August. We can define Wormhole as a protocol that allows users to move their tokens and NFTs between Solana and Ethereum. The Wormhole developers have now offered the hacker a reward for returning the tokens they obtained:
“We noticed that you can take advantage of Solana VAA verification and mint tokens. We would like to offer you a whitehat deal and offer a $10 million bug bounty for you to return the attack details and the wETH you minted.”
Co-founder of blockchain analytics firm Elliptic Tom Robinson said the following on the subject:
“This shows once again that the security of DeFi services is not at a level suitable for the huge sums stored in them. Blockchain’s transparency allows hackers to identify and exploit major bugs.”
The “Ethereum killer” controversy
In January, Solana suffered two major outages, resulting in a total of four outages in six months. Some of the network’s enthusiasts attribute these problems to Solana’s early stage. One of them is the CEO of FTX, who says Solana has outdone itself compared to all other blockchains. Sam Bankman-Fried.
In the past eight hours, SOL prices have dropped 12 percent from about $111 to $97. At press time, the token 99.03 traded in dollars. And like many other cryptocurrencies, SOL is currently 62.5% behind its all-time high of $260 on Nov.
End wormhole attack and past network outages, Solana is truly as it launched. “Ethereum killer” It is debated whether or not.