The cross-chain bridge is operational again, but the hacker still controls the stolen funds.
Jump Trading has provided Wormhole with funds to cover the $322 million exploit it suffered last night. The hacker’s new fortune remains in their wallet, though.
Wormhole Bridge Usable Again
Jump Trading, parent company of Wormhole, has put up the funds to cover losses incurred in the bridge protocol’s significant exploit last night.
Wormhole tweeted today that it planned to publish a detailed incident report and gave a rough timeline of important events—the 120,000 ETH exploit occurred at 18:26 UTC yesterday; the patch was implemented at 00:33 UTC; Jump replenished the contract with 120,000 ETH today at 13:08 UTC; finally, the protocol reopened by 13:29 UTC.
Jump Trading, the parent company of Wormhole, is a high-frequency, proprietary trading firm with investments in prominent projects like Solana, Terra, Amp, and Voyager. It has a long reputation of being a fairly secretive firm.
A little over 30 minutes after the exploit, Twitter user “smartcontracts” detailed how the hack occurred in a long thread. In essence, the attacker was able to effectively fake the signatures of the so-called “guardians” that sign off on bridge transfers. Whitehat hacker “samczsun” offers a more detailed account here.
Wormhole has offered last night’s attacker a $10 million whitehat agreement for returning the funds and detailing his attacking methodology, but so far has not been taken up on the offer.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and several other cryptocurrencies.
