This happened on February 2nd and it sent shockwaves through the crypto world, even though it's "used to" experiencing hacks. The hack involved over 120,000 wETH (the equivalent of wrapped ETH ). The dollar amount is $320 million, making it the second largest hack in DeFi history.
(The first was the 620 million Poly in September 2021 but the funds were returned by the white hacker behind the hack).
This makes the Wormhole.finance hack the biggest in history…
Very quickly, the protocol in question "Wormhole" declared that the vulnerability had been corrected and that the funds would be restored.
The company is offering a $10 million reward to any computer scientists who can explain and/or trace the hack.
The incident report can be read here.
For many experts, this hack is one too many because we realize that blockchain is really a still immature technology exploiting vulnerable codes.
It seems to focus mainly on returns instead of focusing on safety, and that becomes really problematic...
In traditional IT, companies heavily hire hackers and IT specialists to continually update security. If they are hacked, they will even tend to want to employ the hacker so that he resolves the flaws himself.
What you need to understand is that the security flaws lie in the protocols created on certain blockchains. Even if the latter are secure (because they are the ones that do the most work on this aspect), the fact remains that the protocols and smart contrasts built on them do not have the same vigilance. It is important to differentiate between the two structures.
There are even developers who can intentionally create applications with vulnerabilities in order to exploit them later…
Security must become one of the first challenges of DeFi
Of course, DeFi is attracting more and more people due in part to its attractive returns, but if it continues to also display its exploits with regard to poor security, it could be a zero-sum game.
This also goes hand in hand with the ever-increasing number of scammers who enter this sphere taking advantage of the possibility of being anonymous. As we saw with Wonderland recently, notorious criminals can then blend in with the crowd thanks to the anonymity of DeFi…
This year, the total amount stolen in decentralized finance has reached over $10 billion… Scams, thefts, hacks, fraud, rug pulls , etc… This paints a negative picture of the technology, as the risks of losing money are numerous…
It's hangover time...
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