The Wormhole network is exploited for 120K wETH, accused of rug pulling

Wormhole released a statement indicating that their network has been exploited for 120K wETH, around $320 million at the time of writing. After approximately 4 hours, the team announced that the vulnerability has been patched, and that they are working to get the Wormhole network up and running soon. Since then, there have been no further updates from the devs.

This exploit represents the largest DeFi exploit of 2022, so far. Elliptic’s Tom Robinson reported that Wormhole has offered a white hat agreement and a bug bounty of $10 million to the hacker. If accepted, the hacker needs to provide the exploit details and return all the stolen wETHs.

Regardless, the Wormhole community did not mince words as they expressed their frustration over the matter, some even calling it a rug pull.

Wormhole Network

In essence, this network is a cross-chain messaging protocol that provides interoperability to a variety of blockchain networks. The Wormhole mainnet supports Solana, Ethereum, Terra, Binance Smart Chain, and several other networks. Supposedly, the Wormhole network should be able to onboard new chains easily without disrupting the activities of the rest of the network.

Last month, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his security concerns regarding such bridges. Storing native assets directly-chain provides a certain level of security and immunity against 51% attacks. However, cross-chain bridges do not have such immunity and malicious parties may take advantage of the infrastructure. In addition, this exploit can scale negatively as more bridges join the network.

As of now, nothing left but to wait for further updates and explanations from the Wormhole team.