ThorChain Loses $8 Million to Lesson-Teaching Hacker

ThorChain has suffered its second straight attack in two weeks after a grey-hat attacker made away with more than $8 million in exploit.

The cross-chain decentralized exchange announced that its network had been hit by a hacker who successfully made off with ETH, USDC, SUSHI, XRUNE, and a slew of other coins.

ThorChain has been in beta phase for its Chaosnet launch, an idea its anonymous team first conceived in 2018 during  a hackathon. Often described as the “internet of all blockchains,” the network has leveraged Cosmos to facilitate cross-chain interactions in recent times. In the same way, ThorChain’s beta phase stage had sailed smoothly with fresh optimism for its interoperable technology, until its latest attacks. 

Its attack on Thursday is the second one the network has suffered in two weeks. 

Grey Hat, Good Heart

The hacker has split opinions among the media since their attack; what they haven’t split yet, of course, is their stolen bounty. Described by many voices in the media as “white-hat”, an official from ThorChain admitted it would be more correct to label the attacker as a grey type.

“Do not rush code that controls 9 figures,” the hacker wrote to ThorChain. “Disable until audits are complete.”

A warning. Two warnings. And eight million in dollars carted away. The attacker said it could have gotten away with more: more money, more coins, including Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Binance coin. They chose not to do this because their intention was to teach ThorChain a lesson. The attack, they noted, could have been prevented by a ten percent bug bounty offered by ThorChain.

White hat hackers are often contracted by the affected organization to discover potential bugs. In this case, the attacker was not. There are hopes that the attacker might take ThorChain’s new offer of a ten percent bounty from its treasury, and help point out other flaws in ThorChain’s code. Hopes are slim though. On July 16, ThorChain was halted after 4,000 Ether worth $7.6 million was drained from the protocol. The protocol unsuccessfully proposed a bug bounty to the hacker in exchange for returning the stolen funds. It is possible that the latest loot might have the same outcome.

After ThorChain’s attack, its native token, RUNE, lost more than 24% of its value. The token has recovered in the past hours and currently trades at $3.85 per token, according to Coinmarketcap. 

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