Hackers Exploit Ethereum (ETH) Rival, Normal Activity Paused To Prevent Theft of More Tokens

Layer-1 blockchain Hedera (HBAR) had to pause normal activity this week due to a hack on its smart contract service code.

The Ethereum (ETH) competitor acknowledged the exploit in a tweet on Thursday.

“Today, attackers exploited the Smart Contract Service code of the Hedera mainnet to transfer Hedera Token Service tokens held by victims’ accounts to their own account.

The attacker targeted accounts used as liquidity pools on multiple DEXs that use Uniswap v2-derived contract code ported over to use the Hedera Token Service, including Pangolin Hedera, SaucerSwap Labs and HeliSwap DEX. 

When the attackers moved tokens obtained through these attacks over the Hashport Network bridge, the bridge operators detected the activity and took swift action to disable it.”

Hedera says it turned off mainnet proxies to remove the hacker’s access to the mainnet and prevent them from stealing additional tokens.

On Friday evening, Hedera’s chief marketing officer Christain Hasker announced Hedera was back online.

Aaaaaand we’re back! https://t.co/sUahtuSoA4 – thank you all so much @hedera community. Blog post incoming.

— Christian Hasker (@chasker) March 11, 2023

Total value locked (TVL) on Hedera plummeted from around $36.81 million prior to the hack to $24.57 million on Friday afternoon, a more than 33% decrease, according to Defi Llama.

The TVL of a blockchain represents the total capital held within its smart contracts. TVL is calculated by multiplying the amount of collateral locked into the network by the current value of the assets.

HBAR, Hedera’s native asset, is trading around $0.0594 at time of writing, which is roughly equivalent to what it was priced at prior to the exploit.

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