According to Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora Labs, cross-chain bridge Rainbow Bridge successfully prevented a hack attempt on its platform in which a hacker lost 5 ETH.
He described an incident on Twitter that the perpetrator has submitted a fabricated NEAR block to the Rainbow Bridge contract with a safe deposit of 5 ETH. The transaction was recorded on the Ethereum blockchain in block number 15378741.
This malicious transaction was easily encountered by Automated independent watchdogs in just 31 seconds. This independent watchdog also observes the NEAR blockchain through blocks submitted on Ethereum. At the end of all settlements, the hacker ended up with a 5 ETH loss.
From the beginning of this year, bridging platforms such as Ronin, Nomad, and Wormhole have seen major cyber attacks on their platforms. Among all this, Ronin suffered an exploit of over $600M which was discovered only 6 days after the hack attack, making it the largest crypto hack in history.
The hacker knew the crew would be slow to respond on the weekends, so he decided to launch his attack on Saturday.
Alex Shevchenko contrasted this cyberattack with a previous one on May 1 that was also stopped by the bridge’s architecture.
In order to boost security on the bridge, Aurora Labs proposed the idea to increase safe deposits on Rainbow Bridge. However, afterwards, this idea was dropped by the team for the sake of decentralization.
Alex Shevchenko claimed that they paid out “the second largest bug bounty in the world to secure their users!”. Also, the platform implemented an audit, alert system, and automatic system in place to make the bridge the most secured among its competitors.
