Solana Bridge named “Wormhole” has been exploited and cryptocurrency amounting to $320 million has been stolen, according to reports released today, February 3rd.

The team posted a notice that the bridge had been hacked and 120,000 Ethereum encapsulated had been lost (Ethereum Encapsulated Means a digital token representing Ethereum and based on a blockchain other than Ethereum) which was valued at approximately $320 million at the time.

The team added that Ethereum will be added to ensure that the Ethereum encapsulated in the bridge is fully supported.

At the time of writing, the Wormhole team’s latest announcement is that the vulnerability has been patched and they’re working on getting things right.

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The wormhole network has been exploited for 120K.

ETH will be added over the next hours to ensure 1:1 support. More details to come soon.

We’re working on getting the network back up quickly. Thank you for your patience.

– Wormhole🌪 (wormholecrypto) February 2, 2022

The biggest hack targeting a blockchain bridge to date:

Security researcher told samczsun about the vulnerability saying that the attacker either obtained the private keys, or he exploited the bridge in a cunning way.

how did you do Tweet embed exploit work? I joined with @gf_256 And the Tweet embed To reverse engineer the exploit, now that it has been patched, we can finally share it with you👇 pic.twitter.com/lXwD0GLZ3N

– samczsun (@samczsun) February 3, 2022

He added that there was a similar transaction in Solana where the attacker blocked the Ethereum bridge.

The hacker basically exploited a weakness in the wETH encapsulated Ethereum mint and became the Ethereum encapsulated mint in the bridge without having to deposit Ethereum.

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Tom Robinson, co-founder of blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, commented on the incident by saying:

This once again shows that the security of DeFi services has not reached the appropriate level for the huge amounts that are stored inside.

Blockchain transparency allows attackers to identify and exploit major bugs.

The developers of Wormhole have posted a message stating that a reward will be given to those who return the loot, stating:

We have noticed that you have been able to exploit the vulnerability.

We would like to offer you a white hat hacker agreement, and offer you a $10 million bug bounty for revealing the exploit details and returning your withdrawal.

The Wormhole bridge and platform were developed by Certus One, which was acquired by Jump Trading last August.

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Impact of the breakout on Solana SOL price:

The bridge hack is the latest in a long list of problems facing Solana which includes 4 network outages in a few months.

SOL prices are down over the past eight hours by 10% from about $111 to $97 at the time of writing.

Solana is trading down 62.5% from its November 6 high of $260.

The Solana project is often described as an Ethereum killer, but this latest setback, along with network issues and faltering performance, makes this moniker moot.

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