The Crypto Bridges
Crypto bridges have grown to be a popular target for bad actors. Not all malevolent attackers, meanwhile, manage to escape with millions of dollars worth of digital assets. Some people really lose money when attempting DeFi exploits. Such a situation occurred over the weekend when hackers were effectively stopped by the Near Protocol’s Rainbow Bridge.
Over the weekend, hackers attempted to take advantage of Near Protocol’s Rainbow Bridge once more. Similar to the initial effort in May, automatic security procedures stopped the assault in just 31 seconds, according to an announcement made on Monday by Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora Labs. Interoperability across blockchains is made possible through cross-chain bridges. Through smart contracts, users may transfer money between the Near Protocol, Ethereum, and Aurora through the Rainbow bridge.
The 5 ETH Lost Investment
Shevchenko claims that the hacker posted the necessary safe deposit of 5 ether on Saturday morning and submitted a fake Near block to the Rainbow Bridge. The hacker likely believed the early-morning weekend attempt would have been challenging to stop. However, the fraudulent transaction was stopped by Rainbow’s automatic watchdogs, costing the hacker their 5 ETH investment, which at the time was worth around 8,000 USD, in the process. In the attempted exploit, no user cash was lost.
Instead of stealing users’ money and having a difficult time attempting to launder the illicit assets, Shevchenko urged the attacker to concentrate on doing good for the community by working on bug bounties. Because the cross-chain area is still developing, exploits are already common. Bridge attacks have resulted in the theft of 2 billion USD worth of cryptocurrencies this year alone. In 2022, this amount will represent about 69% of all crypto funds that have been stolen.
Nomad Bridge lost around 200 million USD earlier this month as a result of an easily reproducible bug that let several attackers steal money from the protocol. In addition, 625 million USD in tokens were taken from Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge in March, while Harmony’s Horizon bridge was compromised last month for almost 100 million USD. According to reports, the Ronin exploiters utilized the coin mixers ChipMixer and Blender to further obfuscate their identities while converting a portion of the stolen funds from ETH to BTC.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/09/19/hacker-lost-5-ether-on-near-protocols-rainbow-bridge/