Unknown Hacker Steals $100m From California-Based Cryptocurrency Firm Harmony

An unidentified hacker group has stolen extra than $100m from Californian cryptocurrency business Harmony.

The business created the announcement previous Thursday in a Twitter thread, indicating they had determined a theft occurring on the Horizon bridge amounting to somewhere around $100m.

“We have begun doing the job with countrywide authorities and forensic specialists to detect the offender and retrieve the stolen funds,” reads the very first Twitter put up.

✔ Approved From Our Partners

Protect and backup your data using AOMEI Backupper. AOMEI Backupper takes secure and encrypted backups from your Windows, hard drives or partitions. With AOMEI Backupper you will never be worried about loosing your data anymore.

Get AOMEI Backupper with 72% discount from an authorized distrinutor of AOMEI: SerialCart® (Limited Offer).

➤ Activate Your Coupon Code

Even further, Harmony posted the cryptocurrency address of the malicious actor and reassured consumers the rest of the resources held on its blockchain ended up safe and sound.

“Note this does not affect the trustless BTC bridge its resources and property saved on decentralized vaults are secure at this time.”

The organization also mentioned it notified exchanges of the theft and stopped the Horizon bridge to avert further more transactions. 

“The group is all hands on deck as investigations proceed,” reads one of the Twitter posts.

“We will continue to keep everyone up-to-date as we look into this even further and get hold of far more details,” Harmony said last Thursday.

The firm later posted another update on Sunday, giving a $1m bounty for the return of the Horizon bridge cash and sharing exploit facts. 

“Harmony will advocate for no felony prices when money are returned,” the business extra.

Harmony founder Stephen Tse also posted on Twitter on the exact day, indicating that confidentiality was key to sustaining integrity as portion of this ongoing investigation.

“The omission of unique specifics is to safeguard delicate knowledge in the curiosity of our neighborhood.  Incident response has identified no proof of smart deal code breach. No proof of any vulnerability on the Horizon system was discovered. Our consensus layer of the Harmony blockchain remains safe.”

On the other hand, Tse additional the team observed evidence that personal keys had been compromised, foremost to the breach of the Horizon bridge and funds remaining stolen from the Ethereum side of the bridge.

“The attacker was in a position to accessibility and decrypt a range of these keys, some of which were being utilised to sign the unauthorized transactions. Stolen assets include things like BUSD, USDC, ETH, and WBTC.”

The Harmony hack is barely the initial substantial cryptocurrency theft we noted on in 2022. Again in February, cross-blockchain bridge Wormhole confirmed attackers stole 120,000 Ethereum tokens worth more than $320m. 

In April, a  group of on the internet fraudsters made virtually $1.7m by promising cryptocurrency giveaways on YouTube.

Much more a short while ago, Cryptocurrency mixing service Blender.io was hit with US government sanctions for alleged connections with North Korean hackers responsible for a $620m crypto theft that happened in March