It was only a matter of time before hackers targeted the publishers of one of the biggest cryptocurrency games on the market.
With Illuvium having been an early target because of its huge potential, other games may be quaking in their boots.
And the latest crypto hack may be the largest yet.
On March 29th 2022 the gaming-focused Ronin network announced a loss of over $625 million in USDC and ether (ETH).
According to a blog post published by the Ronin network’s official Substack, the exploit affected Ronin validator nodes for Sky Mavis, the publishers of the popular Axie Infinity game, and the Axie DAO.
An attacker “used hacked private keys in order to forge fake withdrawals” from the Ronin bridge across two transactions, as seen on Etherscan.
While the Ronin sidechain has nine validators requiring five signatures for withdrawals and is meant to protect against these types of attacks, the blog post notes that “the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator.”
The blog post pegged the losses at 173,600 ether and 25.5 million in USDC, currently worth in excess of $625 million.
Back in August 2021, a hacker made off with $611 million in an exploit of cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Poly Network. The vast majority of the funds were returned.
The Ronin attacker’s Ethereum address is a fresh address that transferred ETH in from the Binance exchange one week ago. Etherscan records show that the attack took place last Wednesday.
The majority of the funds remain in the attacker’s address, though 6,250 ETH has been transferred to various other addresses.
The Ronin Bridge and the Katana automated market maker (AMM) have both been paused while investigations are ongoing.
“We are working directly with various government agencies to ensure the criminals get brought to justice,” the blog notes.
The price of RON, the native token of the Ronin network, is down 27% on the news, according to CoinGecko.
Disclaimer: IlluviumFox is a news aggregator sit and not a financial advisor. Readers are advised to do their own due diligence before making any financial decisions. Cryptocurrency is highly volatile and risky and IlluviumFox takes no responsibility for any actions readers might take after reading the articles on this site.
