Early estimates put the hacking of the Harmony Horizon Bridge at $100M ETH on June 23, which was later confirmed by the platform. To recover the stolen digital assets, Harmony Protocol has put on a $1 million bounty. On June 26, Harmony, an open and fast blockchain platform, tweeted that the platform was ready to offer a $1M bounty to the hacker in exchange for the stolen $100 million worth of ETH.
Harmony is also offering the amount to other hackers for sharing information about how the attack happened. To contact them, the platform also provided their ETH address 0xd6ddd996b2d5b7db22306654fd548ba2a58693ac and email address whitehat@harmony.one.
Harmony has promised that no criminal charges will be imposed on the hacker when all the funds are returned. Surprisingly, the trustless BTC bridge is unaffected by this hack attack, and funds and assets are stored in secure decentralised vaults.
The crypto community on Twitter thinks that a $1M bounty in return of $100M is too low as it is only 1% of the total hacked assets.
Richard Heart, a popular crypto expert and youtuber, also mocked Harmony by tweeting:
Plz hacker sir. We give u 1M u gives us back 100M plz.
— Richard Heart (@RichardHeartWin) June 26, 2022
On his official Twitter handle, Harmony Founder and CEO Stephen Tse is constantly updating his followers on the hack details.
On June 25, the Harmony platform reported that engineers from several countries, including the United States, Greece, India, and Cambodia, make up their inquiry team. The team’s US colleagues received the information and have now picked up the probe along with their cyber security allies.
1/ An incident response update on the Horizon bridge hack 🧵
Confidentiality is key to maintain integrity as part of this ongoing investigation. The omission of specific details is to protect sensitive data in the interest of our community.
— stephen tse 💙 s.one 🌉 stse.eth (@stse) June 26, 2022
The team has discovered evidence that private keys were compromised, resulting in the Horizon bridge breach. Funds were stolen on the Ethereum side of the bridge. No single machine had access to multiple plaintext keys since Harmony double encrypted and stored the private keys using a key management service and a passphrase.
At the time of writing, Harmony’s native token-ONE is trading at $0.023501 with market volume of $52,734,221 in the last 24 hours.
Read more:
Scam alert: Harmony Protocol loses NFT token worth of $100 million from its Horizon bridge
