all you need to know about the Wormhole Bridge hack

Solana’s price has taken a hit again after attempting to correct the recent drop. This time the price is dropping after a bridge between Solana and Ethereum, called Wormhole Bridge, was hacked resulting in a loss of 120000 wrapped ETH with an estimated worth of $320 million.

Solana is currently trading at $98.45 with a drop of 9.42% in the last 24 hours. It is now trading 62.15% down from its November 6, 2021, all-time high of $260.06.

SOL’s current market cap stands at $30.9 billion. It has a circulating supply of 314.8 million SOL coins and a 24 hours trading volume of $3.2 billion.

Wormhole Bridge hack

According to emerging reports, the Wormhole Bridge was hacked in the early hours of February 3

According to reports and Twitter posts made by Solana Team, the hack resulted in a loss of about 120,000 wrapped ETH coins worth a whopping $320 million. After the hack, the team said that Ethereum (ETH) will be added to the bridge to ensure that any wrapped ETH on the Bridge is fully backed.

The wormhole network was exploited for 120k wETH.

ETH will be added over the next hours to ensure wETH is backed 1:1. More details to come shortly.

We are working to get the network back up quickly. Thanks for your patience.

— Wormhole🌪 (@wormholecrypto) February 2, 2022

On the other hand, Wormhole has already confirmed that the issue had been sorted out and the vulnerability has been patched. They are currently working on getting the entire network up again.

Wormhole developers went ahead to offer a bug bounty for the exploit details. They said:

“We noticed that you were able to exploit the Solana VAA verification and mint tokens. We would like to offer you a whitehat agreement, and present you a bug bounty of $10 million for exploit details, and returning the wETH you have minted.”

This hack, brings to light again the vulnerability of DeFi protocols, and the co-founder of blockchain analysis firm Elliptic Tom Robinson, said:

“This demonstrates once again that the security of DeFi services has not reached a level that is appropriate for the huge sums being stored within them. The transparency of the blockchain is allowing attackers to identify and exploit major bugs.”

Solana’s unending woes

The bridge hack is the latest in the growing list of Solana’s unending problems. First, it was four consecutive network outages on the Solana network in January and then this hack.

The hack came at a time when Solana was prepared to correct the market price fall of SOL that had resulted from the network congestions. It now complicates issues for the network taunted as an “Ethereum Killer.”

Samczsun, a paradigm security researcher, started by first determining if the hack started on Ethereum or Solana.

From Samczsun’s research, there were only two possible routes that the hacker(s) could have used. They either exploited the bridge or got the private keys. In addition, he said that there was a corresponding transaction on Solana where the hacker bridged out the ETH without depositing them by exploiting a vulnerability to mint wETH. The encoded VM that the attacker submitted showed that it contained valid signatures from the guardians

How did the @wormholecrypto exploit work? I joined forces with @gf_256 and @ret2jazzy to reverse engineer the exploit, and now that it’s been patched we can finally share it with you👇 pic.twitter.com/lXwD0GLZ3N

— samczsun (@samczsun) February 3, 2022