An investigation with the help of national law enforcement agencies has been initiated.
There has been no evidence of a smart contact vulnerability being exploited in this assault.
The hacker that returns $100 million in stolen assets will get a $1 million reward from Harmony Protocol. Over $100 million in assets were stolen from the Horizon Bridge, which connects Harmony Layer-1 to the rest of the network. As a link between the Ethereum, Binance Chain, and Bitcoin ecosystems, Horizon served as a conduit.
According to the network, it has initiated an investigation with the help of national law enforcement agencies.
$1 Million Seems Low For Returning $100M
Hackers will also be rewarded if they divulge details about the attack’s methodology. In addition, if the stolen monies are recovered, no criminal charges would be filed against the hackers, according to the group, even though a $1 million reward for a $100 million hack seems to be excessively low.
According to a tweet from Harmony’s CEO and founder, there has been no evidence of a smart contact vulnerability being exploited in this assault. In addition, he said that new information suggests that private keys were hacked. He also claimed that Harmony’s private keys were encrypted and stored using a password and key management system. After decoding some of these private keys, the attacker could sign illegal transactions with their signatures.
A 12 percent drop in only 24 hours was enough to send the ONE token, Harmony’s native token, plummeting once the vulnerability was made public. This was even though bitcoin was approaching the $21,000 threshold in the larger market.
More than $1 billion was lost in 2022 alone due to attacks on bridges, which enable users to transfer tokens across blockchains. Wormhole Bridge lost $326 million in a breach in February, while Ronin lost $625 million in an attack in April.