In the space of just about a month and a few days, four major cryptocurrency firms have been attacked and over $300 million lost as hackers succeeded in gaining access to thousands of crypto wallets.
With the crypto industry already unsettled with the complaints of un-stabilized prices, the recent commotion has displaced over 10,000 traders who trade under four different firms.
For Harmony, Nomad, Solana, and ZB Exchange, it has been one hell of a month as millions of dollars have been fleeced by the hackers who took advantage of a loophole in their block-chain to siphon crypto from traders’ wallets.
According to a block-chain analysis firm Elliptic, Solana had reported on Wednesday, August 3, 2022, that a total of 7,700 wallets had been breached with over $5.2 million stolen.
The stolen assets include Solana tokens and stable coins known and traded as USD.
While announcing the ugly development, the firm acknowledged that “an exploit allowed a malicious actor to drain funds from a number of wallets on Solana”.
Just two days before Solana’s revelation, another crypto firm, Nomad, had made similar complaints announcing that over $190 million had been drained from the company after a hacker got access to its system.
The attack on Nomad’s system was massive as the hacker left electronic imprints which allowed other hackers to use the code to continue the stealing spree on Nomad’s system.
Another firm, Harmony had also made the same disclosure as it announced that their system was infiltrated by hackers.
It made the announcement on Thursday, June 23, 2022, that hackers had gotten access to the Horizon bridge, the bridge to Harmony’s layer-1 block-chain where they carried out 11 transactions for various tokens amounting to approximately $100Million.
The disturbing number of hacks come amid earlier concerns about the quality of the two of four multisig (a digital wallet that operates with multi-signature addresses) that reportedly secures the bridge.
ZB Exchange, which claims to be “the world’s most secure digital asset exchange,” received its share of attack as it announced a loss of $4.8Million due to hacks on its system.
Popular Block-chain investigator, PeckShieldhad made the revelation alleging that hackers might be responsible for the transfer of over 20 types of tokens off ZB’s system which include Tether (USDT), Shiba Inu (SHIB), and Tesra (TSR).
Many users and crypto watchers had suspected the attack as ZB had made an announcement on Wednesday, the 3rd of August 2022, warning traders to suspend deposits and withdrawals.
The reason was stated as the “sudden failure of some core applications.”
According to a report by block-chain analytics firm, Chainalysis, there have been 13 separate token bridge hacks this year resulting in a loss of over $2 billion.