Virtual currency worth 14 billion yen is stolen from the blockchain bridge

“Harmony,” a blockchain platform designed to facilitate the creation and use of decentralized applications, will launch the Horizon Bridge, a blockchain bridge to facilitate transfers between multiple cryptocurrency tokens. It announced that virtual currency equivalent to 100 million dollars (about 14 billion yen) was stolen.

Hacker steals $100 million from Harmony blockchain bridge | Mashable
https://mashable.com/article/harmony-blockchain-bridge-100-million-hack

A blockchain bridge is an application for moving cryptocurrencies from one blockchain to another. Harmony operates its own blockchain bridge, the Horizon Bridge, which is used to move assets to and from the Ethereum blockchain and the BNB chain. Harmony reports that this Horizon Bridge was attacked by hackers and $ 100 million was stolen. Harmony says it is working with U.S. regulators and experts to identify hackers and recover stolen cryptocurrencies.

1/ The Harmony team has identified a theft occurring this morning on the Horizon bridge amounting to approx. $100MM. We have begun working with national authorities and forensic specialists to identify the culprit and retrieve the stolen funds.

More????

— Harmony???? (@harmonyprotocol) June 23, 2022

Although the details of this attack have not been disclosed, Elliptic, a blockchain analysis company, has analyzed that 'various virtual currency tokens may have been stolen as a result of the bridge being compromised.' Elliptic cites Ethereum, BNB (Binance Coin), Tether, USD Coin, Dai, etc. as virtual currencies stolen via the Horizon Bridge, and pointed out that all stolen tokens were exchanged for Ethereum.

According to Harmony, this attack does not affect the Bitcoin bridge.

3/ Note this does not impact the trustless BTC bridge; its funds and assets stored on decentralized vaults are safe at this time.

— Harmony???? (@harmonyprotocol) June 23, 2022

Twitter user Ape Dev points out a security vulnerability in the blockchain bridge as of April 2022. According to Ape Dev, hackers only need access to two multisig private keys to authorize the transfer of funds.

Since the current narrative du-jour is bridges & bridge hacks, I wanted to do some digging on the harmony bridge on Ethereum which secures ~$330m worth of tokens.

— Ape Dev (@_apedev) April 1, 2022

This is not the first time a blockchain bridge has been attacked by hackers. In fact, even when limited to the hacking damage targeting blockchain bridges that occurred in 2022, the amount of damage was the fourth largest .