A second multi-million-dollar attack targeted the cross-chain decentralized exchange THORChain, causing a loss of $8 million worth of Ether and an 80% price drop of its RUNE token.
Third Attack This Year, Second This Week
On July 23rd THORChain took to Twitter to disclose the hack that cost the company $8 million.
Incidentally, this hack happened right on the heels of the flash loan attack that occurred last week due to a router vulnerability and cost the company $5 million.
It is the third attack on the company this year, with the first happening back in June when it lost around $140,000.
Protocol advocate and ShapeShift CEO, Erik Voorhees commented on the situation, saying,
“Thorchain has had a horrible month, not going to sugar coat it. The project needs to slow down. Time to take the tortoise strategy. Regardless, I remain a committed supporter, and am glad these issues are being discovered during Chaosnet.”
White-Hat Hacker Shows Mercy
The team also disclosed that it appears to be the work of a white-hat hacker, because of the sophisticated and restrained approach of the hack.
“THORChain has suffered a sophisticated attack on the ETH Router, around $8m. The hacker deliberately limited their impact, seemingly a whitehat.”
In its Discord channel, the company posted a screenshot that revealed the hacker’s claims that they intended to teach the company a lesson. They warned the protocol not to be hasty about code that would control 9 figure amounts and demand that the protocol be disabled until all audits were completed. In addition, they claimed that they had found multiple critical issues in the protocol code and could have taken Ethereum, Bitcoin, Binance Coin, Lycancoin, and other BEP-20 tokens if they wanted to.
The THORChain team also confirmed that they are more than willing to pay off the hacker if approached with a monetary demand. Addressing the attacks, the THORChain team commented,
“The complexity of the state machine is currently its Achille’s heel, but this can be solved with more eyes on, as well as a re-think in developer procedures and peer-review.”
RUNE Can’t Catch A Break
THORChain’s native token, RUNE, went through a 27% drop when it fell from its intraday high of $4.80 to $3.50. In the course of the last two weeks, the token has dropped a total of 38% following the two attacks.
The token was highly hyped about and had peaked on May 19th with a value of $20.87. Since then, there has been a whopping 81.5% drop to the present $3.81 at the time of writing.
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