$323M In My Wallet

Alright, can you imagine that humungous number inside your wallet or bank account? I can't. I mean, all the mansions I can buy, all the luxury cars I can fit in all their garages, all the Jordan's I can stack up on a room dedicated to all my kicks, and the room is the size of a museum? I don't know how many bowls of Michelin-starred ramen I could eat. And of course, how many beautiful ladies I can... treat with utter pleasantries and respect. Not that, it is relevant to the amount of money, I would just have a lot of free time to explore....the world with these ladies, as a philanthropist.

Well, for some people, they wouldn't have to imagine, all they do is look at their Ethereum wallet and they can then think what to do with that huge of a figure. Just like the hacker or hackers that attacked Wormhole bridge earlier this year. They managed to mint 120,000 ETH worth $323M as of that time. Whew.

So what's Wormhole? And how did it happen?

Wormhole is a cross-chain bridge that bridges SOLANA to other blockchains. If you need a refresher on how cross-chain bridges work, then definitely visit my other article here: Crossing Blockchains with Cross-chain Bridges.

So as we know, bridges allow cross transactions to happen by holding the native token and then minting another type of token on the other blockchain that is equivalent to the held tokens.

To help visualize it, let's play a little scenario in our minds.

Let's say you have a Metamask wallet. Now let's say you have 1 ETH on your wallet and you want to use that ETH over at SOLANA blockchain. Instead of selling your ETH to fiat and then buying SOL using that fiat money, you'll use Wormhole to sort of transfer your 1 ETH over to SOLANA. The request was processed, it was validated, and then the minting of 1 ETH over at SOLANA is approved and granted.

Now you have 0 ETH on ETHEREUM blockchain and you have the equivalent over at SOLANA blockchain.

The hack worked in the same concept. According to some experts who looked at the case of the Wormhole hack, the hacker/s used a previous request to successfully mint those 120,000 ETH.

To fit it with our example, let's say that they use your request to mint 1 ETH over at SOLANA but they tweaked it a bit. They changed 1 to 120,000 and they changed the wallet address from yours to theirs. The validator over at Wormhole failed to recognize that the request has been tampered with and forged and he proceeded to mint the requested 120,000 ETH but they didn't see that there was no ETH on the Ethereum blockchain with the corresponding amount. It was a small mishap with a colossal effect.

I'm pretty sure that the hacker/s partied all day and all night for several days after that.

But of course, you'd think that people capable of doing that stuff are not after money, maybe they are after the challenge or to just expose the vulnerability of the system. Or maybe, they are even insiders. Who knows?

Have you seen your ETH wallet lately? Take a peek, maybe you have been an unsuspecting benefactor in an attempt to launder the stolen ETH and you might have a couple inside your wallet. Wew.

All I know is, if I have the skills to do that hack, I'll just create my own bridge and get rich in a legal way, and then when there's enough crypto locked in my bridge, I will pull it off the internet. LOL. Just kidding, or..am I?

Hi!!!

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I really appreciate your time being here, and that's it from me, until we read again...

Cheers!!!

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Series    : All About Crypto
Title     : $323M In My Wallet
Published : 14-Mar-2022
Author :  © RB