A wormhole platform was hacked, resulting in the theft of $326 million in cryptocurrency

<p>Hackers stole $320 million in cryptocurrency by exploiting a vulnerability in the Wormhole cross-chain crypto platform.</p> <p>Wormhole is a platform that enables users to transfer cryptocurrency between blockchains. This is accomplished by first encrypting the original token in a smart contract and then minting a wrapped version of the stored token that can be transferred to another blockchain.</p> <p>The platform supports the blockchains Avalanche, Oasis, Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Terra.</p> <p>Wormhole was allegedly hacked for $326 million.</p> <p>Wormhole announced today at 3:42 PM EST that they were shutting down their platform while they investigated an exploit on their network.</p> <p>Using an exploit, a threat actor stole 120k wrapped Ether tokens on the Solana blockchain. They converted 80,000 of the 120k tokens to Ethereum and left the rest on the Solana blockchain, where they began selling them.</p> <p>Wormhole later confirmed that a hacker stole 120k wrapped Ethereum (wEth) and that Ethereum would be added to their platform to ensure that all wETh is properly backed.</p> <p>According to Elliptic, a Wormhole representative sent a message to the hacker's address offering a $10 million bug bounty under a "whitehat agreement."</p> <p>This agreement requires the return of all stolen funds as well as information about the vulnerability and the exploit used.</p> <p>"We noticed you were able to exploit the Solana VAA verification and mint tokens, so this is the Wormhole Deployer. We'd like to offer you a whitehat agreement, a bug bounty of $10 million for exploit details, and the wETH you've earned back. You can contact us at contact@certus.one "Wormhole sent a message to the attackers.</p> <p>It's unclear whether the hacker responded to the message and is willing to collaborate with Wormhole to recover the assets.</p> <p>Wormhole is now the second-largest attack on DeFi services, after Poly Network, which was hacked for more than $600 million in August.</p> <p> </p>