Harmony Horizon Bridge Loses $100M in Latest Crypto Exploit

As if cryp­to mar­kets and the over­all ecosys­tem were not in a bad place already, things have just got much worse for Har­mo­ny Protocol.

Har­mo­ny post­ed that it “iden­ti­fied a theft” occur­ring on the Hori­zon bridge. The exploit was to the tune of around $100 mil­lion in var­i­ous cryp­to assets which were sent to the hacker’s Ethereum address.

At the time of writ­ing, 85,867 sat in this address worth an esti­mat­ed $99.3 million.

A few hours after the exploit, Har­mo­ny tweet­ed that it was “work­ing around the clock as we con­tin­ue our inves­ti­ga­tion along­side the FBI and mul­ti­ple cyber secu­ri­ty firms.”

At the time, it stat­ed that it did not impact the trust­less BTC bridge as funds and assets stored on decen­tral­ized vaults were safe.

Another bridge attack

This lat­est attack fol­lows the Ronin bridge exploit in March, the cryp­to industry’s largest result­ing in the loss of more than $600 mil­lion. A month ear­li­er, hack­ers pil­fered more than $300 mil­lion from the Worm­hole bridge.

Har­mo­ny is a high­ly scal­able, proof-of-stake, Layer‑1 blockchain. Binance part­nered with Har­mo­ny for an Ini­tial Exchange Offer­ing (IEO) in May 2019. 

The Hori­zon bridge is the gate­way between Har­mo­ny and oth­er net­works such as Ethereum, Bit­coin, and Binance Chain.

Con­cerns were raised about the Hori­zon bridge by Chain­stride Cap­i­tal founder “@_apedev” in April. He did some dig­ging to reveal that the secu­ri­ty was gov­erned by a mul­ti­sig wal­let with four own­ers. Only two were required to exe­cute an arbi­trary trans­ac­tion he observed, stat­ing at the time:

“So all in all, if two of the four mul­ti­sig sign­ers are com­pro­mised, we’re going to see anoth­er nine fig­ure hack.”

Mul­ti­sigs for bridges con­tin­ues to be a point of weak­ness for cryp­to pro­to­cols since not all sig­na­to­ries are required to con­duct a transaction.

This time, it was Har­mo­ny Pro­to­col that found out the hard way. Accord­ing to DeFiYield’s Rekt data­base, this exploit will be the industry’s four­teenth largest.

ONE price plunge

The dam­age to Harmony’s native token, ONE, has not been that bad all things con­sid­ered. The token has lost around 11% over the past 12 hours or so.

ONE was trad­ing at $0.024 at the time of writ­ing, after falling almost 40% in the past fort­night accord­ing to CoinGecko. ONE is cur­rent­ly trad­ing down 93.7% from its Oct all-time high of $0.379.

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