Hacker Behind $320 Million Wormhole Bridge Exploit Initially Eligible for $50,000 Airdrop

cryptonews.com:

The hacker responsible for the notorious $320 million exploit of the Wormhole bridge In 2022 found themselves initially eligible for an airdrop, potentially claiming $50,000 in newly launched W tokens.

An investigation conducted by pseudonymous researcher Pland, detailed in an X post on April 4th, revealed that the Wormhole team overlooked excluding several wallet addresses associated with the exploit that drained $321 million in crypto from the cross-chain bridge.

Wormhole forgot to exclude the exploiter from the airdrop pic.twitter.com/xkkpDz9RAl

— Pland (@Pland__) April 3, 2024

Wormhole, a cross-chain protocol, is a token bridge that allows users to send and receive crypto between Ethereum, Solana, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Polygon, Avalanche, Oasis, and Terra without the use of a centralized exchange. 

In February 2022,  hackers compromised Wormhole Bridge leading to 120,000 wETH loss from the platform, equivalent to $321 million. It was the largest DeFi attack of 2022 and the hacker swapped wETH tokens with Ethereum, SOL, USDC, APE, SX, etc.

Later, Wormhole rewarded a white hacker with $10 million for rectifying a bug in its core bridge contract on Ethereum just after its platform was compromised in the cyber attack.

However, in February 2023, Web3 infrastructure firm Jump Crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Oasis.app executed a “counter exploit” on the Wormhole protocol hacker. Through their efforts, a total of $225 million in digital assets were successfully recovered and returned to secure wallets.

SOURCE A: https://t.co/EXtHwdBpIH
SOURCE B: https://t.co/JF4TKftJPn
SOURCE C: https://t.co/sbMhdtrU61
SOURCE D: https://t.co/5emx1r8kfe
SOURCE E: https://t.co/ILLzx6SbtG
SOURCE F: https://t.co/y11GEbWKM8

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