Wormhole protocol paid out $10 million to white hacker

Developers have fixed a vulnerability in a smart contract that potentially could have led to the blocking of users’ assets

21.05.2022 - 08:30

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2 min

What’s new? The developers of the Wormhole cross-chain protocol paid a white hat hacker $10 million as a reward for discovering a critical vulnerability. An unknown person under the nickname satya0x reported a vulnerability in the smart contract, with which attackers could have blocked all users’ assets. According to the developers’ blog, the hacker identified it back on February 24, 2022.

Wormhole’s blog post

What is known about Wormhole’s reward system? On February 2, 2022, representatives of the Wormhole network reported that the platform had been hacked. Using an exploit, the attackers withdrew 120 000 wETH (approximately $320 million at the time) from the protocol.

The project team approached the hackers directly and offered them a reward of $10 million for identifying the vulnerability and recovering the stolen funds. However, there was no response back, so Wormhole decided to use the services of white hat hackers.

What is Wormhole? It is a cross-chain protocol that enables the transfer of funds between different blockchains. The project supports Ethereum, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Oasis, and Terra networks.

What happened before? In April, Sky Mavis, the developer of the Axie Infinity game, launched a bounty system for hackers. This decision was made after $625 million in cryptocurrency was withdrawn from the Ronin Network. For detecting “extraordinarily severe issues” the reward can be as much as $1 million.

In February, a hacker under the pseudonym Saurik received a reward of $2 million from the Optimism protocol. He managed to find a loophole in the code that allowed the withdrawal of “virtually unlimited” amounts of ETH.

Also due to the Hack DHS bug bounty program, white hackers were able to discover 122 vulnerabilities in the external systems of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). More than 450 researchers took part in the program, in total they earned $125 600.

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