Reports of cross-chain bridges being targeted by scandalous entities have went up. While not all hackers can run away with millions in their exploit attempts, some end up losing money from their own wallets, as stated by Cointelegraph.
According to Cointelegraph, through a tweet, Alex Shevchenko, CEO, Aurora Labs, mentioned about the story of a hacker who made attempts to exploit the Rainbow bridge but in the end, the hacker lost 5 Ether (ETH) which was worth around $8,000 at the time of writing. Shevchenko stated that the hacker showed a falsified NEAR block to the Rainbow Bridge contract and gave the necessary 5 ETH safe deposit. Despite the hacker’s plan, Shevchenko emphasised on the presence of automated watchdogs which took measures against the illegal transaction. Within 31 seconds, the hackers lost its safe deposit.
On the basis of information by Cointelegraph, due to the hacker’s increasing malicious attempts, Shevchenko remarked about considering an increase in the amount necessary for safe deposits. However, the idea was scraped off on account of the team wanting to stay with only decentralisation. Shevchenko urged the hacker to make efforts in doing good for the community by working on bug bounties instead of robbing users’ money and attempting to launder stolen assets. On June 7, Aurora Labs paid a bug bounty worth six million dollars to an ethical security hacker who noted a criticial vulnerability to the Aurora team. While the bug’s problem was solved and user funds were secured, more than $200 million could have been lost if the whitehat hacker would’ve decided to exploit the network.
Moreover, Cointelegraph mentioned that entities which carried out the Ronin Bridge hack transferred the illegal funds into Bitcoin (BTC). Through the usage of privacy tools such as Blender and ChipMixer, the hackers are still figuring out ways to distribute stolen funds with the aim to outsmart authorities.
(With insights from Cointelegraph)
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