Axie Infinity's Ronin network bridge suffered a massive loss of $620 million in Ethereum & USDC tokens, making it one of the largest DeFi attacks in history...
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Axie Infinity, a popular blockchain gaming platform that developed the Ronin network, an Ethereum sidechain created by Sky Mavis, suffered a loss of $620 million in Ethereum & USDC tokens, making it one of the largest DeFi attacks in history.
According to Sky Mavis, around 173,600 Ethereum & 25.5M USDC tokens were stolen that were worth $617 million exploiting a vulnerability in the Ronin network bridge serving as a way to transfer ERC-20 tokens between the Ethereum and Ronin blockchains. Throughout the attack, five validators' signatures were accessed out of nine validators in order to facilitate the cryptocurrency withdrawal from the bridge, which transpired seven days back on 23rd March, according to the transaction history, leaving the users surprised. However, Sky Mavis came to know about it when a user experienced issues in withdrawing 5,000 Ethereum from the bridge.
The threat actor first establishes control over Sky Mavis system, followed by its four Ronin validators and a third-party validator operated by Axie DAO, eventually retrieving the signature of the Axie DAO validator by using the gas-free RPC to withdraw ETH & USDC deposits from the bridge contract after matching all its withdrawals to the five validators.
_"The validator key scheme is set up to be decentralized to limit an attack vector, similar to this one, but the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator."_ explained in the advisory report from the Ronin Network.
While most of the stolen crypto's are still reflected in the Ethereum address of the attacker, with some transferring attempts of ETH to various addresses and exchanges.
Apparently, Ronin Bridge & the Katana Dex were shut down by Sky Mavis due to the ongoing investigation of stolen Ethereum & USDC; however, all AXS, RON, & SLP tokens on Ronin are secure.
As this is what is arguably considered to be a massive DeFi attack in cryptocurrency history and far beyond then the Poly Network attack last year Ronin Network stated that _"We are working with law enforcement officials, forensic cryptographers, and our investors to make sure there is no loss of user funds. This is our top priority right now,"_
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