Two separate crypto bridge attacks within 7 hours targeted AFX and Verus Ethereum bridges, resulting in a combined loss of over $31.6 million.
On Wednesday, hackers executed two back-to-back crypto bridge exploits targeting the crosschain bridges operated by decentralized perpetual exchange AFX on Arbitrum and the Verus Protocol, respectively. The attacks resulted in a total theft of approximately $31.6 million worth of assets across both platforms.
The first attack occurred at 9:30 pm UTC when Blockaid reported an exploit targeting AFX's bridge, causing it to lose around $24.15 million. Offchain Labs co-founder Stephen Goldfeder confirmed the hack was on a third-party protocol and stated that Arbitrum’s native bridge had not been compromised.
Hours later, at 3:06 am UTC, Blockaid detected another exploit targeting the Verus Ethereum Bridge, which resulted in the theft of over $7.5 million worth of Ether, tBTC (a Bitcoin-backed ERC-20 token), USDC, USDt, EURC, MKR, and scrvUSD from bridge reserves.
The security community highlighted that both incidents appear to involve compromised keys rather than smart contract logic bugs. SunSec, founder of the Web3 security community DeFiHackLabs and a contributor to SEAL, noted this in his analysis. AFX has not yet commented on these events.
These attacks underscore ongoing concerns about crosschain bridge vulnerabilities, which handle significant amounts of assets moving between different blockchains. The repeated incidents highlight the persistent risks faced by decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols despite efforts to enhance security measures.
The broader implications for traders and investors are significant as they indicate a potential increase in targeted cyber threats against DeFi platforms. This could lead to increased scrutiny on bridge security and potentially drive more investment into robust security solutions.
Traders should closely monitor the developments around these incidents, particularly any updates from AFX regarding their response strategy or improvements made to prevent future attacks.
Source: Cointelegraph. Summarized and rewritten by the Vexoda Newsroom. This is market news, not financial advice.