Following a $190 million attack by White hat hackers last week, the hackers have now returned approximately $32.6 million worth of funds. The majority of funds consisted of stablecoins USD Coin, Tether and Frax, along with altcoins.
The vulnerability of the Nomad protocol was highlighted in Nomad’s recent audit by Quantstamp on June 6 and was deemed Low Risk. As soon as the exploit was discovered, members of the public joined the attack by copy-pasting the initial hack transaction, which was akin to a decentralized robbery. More than $190 million worth of cryptocurrencies were drained from Nomad in less than three hours.
The attack came just four months after the project raised $22.4 million in a seed round in April.the attack took advantage of a wrongly initialized Merkle root, which is used in cryptocurrencies to ensure that data blocks sent through a peer-to-peer network are whole and unaltered. A programming error effectively auto-proved any transaction message to be valid.
Not all participants of the heist were capitalizing on the opportunity. Almost immediately after the hack began, whitehat hackers copied the same transaction hash as the original hacker to withdraw funds for their safe return.
