On 24th of June 2022, the Horizon bridge interfacing Harmony – a Layer-1 PoS blockchain was hacked, prompting a loss of around $100 million in ETH and marking the third hacking incident in the last few months. The incident was announced on twitter by blockchain bridge Horizon’s developer. The Harmony bridge has since been closed down to avoid further misfortunes. The developers have additionally explained that the BTC bridge is safe and unaffected.
The hacking incident seems to have occurred over the time span of 17 hours. It all began with an exchange worth 4,919 ETH/ After that, there were many small exchanges between 911 to 0.0003 ETH. The last transaction occurred just after the bridge was shut down.
Harmony appears to have identified the person behind the whole hacking incident, leaving a message proposing to negotiate for the assets refund, as indicated by Elliptic. This has become an all around normal practice in the crypto market, with hacked parties requesting their cash back.
The organization said the hacking doesn’t affect the Bitcoin bridge at all, since its assets and resources are in decentralized vaults and they are protected at that time. Blockchain bridges empower clients to move their cryptos from one blockchain then onto the next, as they can send digital resources between Ethereum network and Binance Smart Chain.
Ronin Network that supports gaming Axie Infinity lost more than $625 million worth coins in late March in a similar incident. While Wormhole that bridges Solana & Ethereum networks lost roughly $320 million in the beginning of February. These incidents are becoming a norm in the crypto world however, the networks need to make their security strong enough to avoid such security breaches.
