An Ethereum crypto bridge Qubit Finance got hacked out of $80 million, becoming the biggest attack this year as we can see in our latest cryptocurrency news today.
An exploit in the decentralized protocol Qubit Finance enabled one hacker to get away with $80 million in stolen crypto a day ago. The smart contract flaw which enabled the attack was located in X-Bridge which is a cross-chain bridge that facilitates token swaps between Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum. This flaw enabled the attacker to input malicious data without having to deposit Ethereum and receive $185 million worth of Qubit xETH which is basically an Ethereum crypto bridge asset to the Binance Smart Chain. The attacker used this money as collateral to borrow $80 million worth of crypto from different lending pools.
It seems the QBridge of @QubitFin is hacked to mint huge amount of xETH collateral and drain the pool funds about $80M. Please note we audited the Qubit lending, not the QBridge! More to come…
— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) January 27, 2022
The full breakdown of assets amounts to 15,6888 wETH, 767 BTC-B, and $9.5 million in stablecoins as well as $5 million in CAKE, Bunny, and MDX tokens. The attacker never converted their qXETH collateral so the total theft turned out to be $80 million. Qubit Finance published a blog post with a breakdown of the attack in its entirety. The team also noted that they are glad to have a conversation with the attacker and attached a message saying that Qubit is prepared to offer the maximum bounty for the exploit in order to minimize the effect on the community.
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[Our message to the exploiter]
The team is glad to have a conversation with you.https://t.co/4SxtuD6pQY pic.twitter.com/V9bICKvWda— Qubit Finance (@QubitFin) January 28, 2022
The blockchain security analysts at Peckshiled noted that they had audited Qubit Finance’s lending protocol and will provide more details soon. While the attack has been the biggest this year, it wasn’t the first cross-chain hack in the new year. Last week we saw a white hat hacker stealing $1.73 million from Multichain but he later returned $900,000 and kept the rest as a bounty. Different blockchains become popular and cross-chain activity grows alongside it with projects like Multichain and Qubit being expected to become key targets for the hackers.
The addresses connected to the attack show 206,809 Binance coins got drained from the Qbridge protocol and now the assets are worth over $80 million at current prices according to the reports by PeckShield. DeFi projects like Qubit Finance rely on smart contracts rather than the third parties to offer financial services like lending, trading, borrowing, and more to the users. Qubit allows users to supply their crypto holdings to the protocol and to borrow loans against the collateral for a fixed fee. Qbridge is a cross-chain feature that enables the users to collateralize the assets on other networks without having to move the assets from one chain to another.
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