Online thieves made off with “wrapped ethereum” worth more than $324 million.
Getty Images
Hackers stole more than $324 million in cryptocurrency from Wormhole, the developers behind the popular blockchain bridge confirmed Wednesday.
The platform provides a connection that allows for the transfer of cryptocurrency between different decentralized-finance blockchain networks. Wormhole said in a series of tweets Wednesday afternoon that thieves made off with 120,000 wETH, or wrapped ethereum, worth nearly $324 million at current exchange rates. The platform’s network was also taken offline for maintenance.
This is one of the largest crypto thefts of all time and the second-largest theft from a DeFi service, blockchain analysis firm Elliptic said in a statement. DeFi is any financial tool that uses blockchain technology to circumvent middleman institutions.
“The exploit appears to have allowed the attacker to mint 120,000 wrapped ETH on the Solana blockchain, 93,750 ETH of which was then transferred to the Ethereum blockchain,” Elliptic said in a blog post.
The team is working on a detailed incident report and will share it asap
18:26 UTC – contract was exploited for 120k ETH
00:33 UTC – vulnerability was patched
13:08 UTC – ETH contract has been filled and all wETH are backed 1:1
13:29 UTC – the Portal (token bridge) is back up
— Wormhole🌪 (@wormholecrypto) February 3, 2022
Certus One, the developers of Wormhole, offered the hacker a $10 million “bug bounty” for the exploit details and return of the cryptocurrency, according to a message shared by Elliptic’s Tom Robinson.
Wormhole on Thursday confirmed via Twitter that “all funds have been restored” and its services are back up. It also promised to share a full incident report.
Certus One didn’t respond to a request for comment.
CNET’s Sean Keane contributed to this report.