Axie Infinity was hacked by hackers, 625 million USD of cryptocurrency was stolen
A huge amount of cryptocurrency worth nearly 625 million USD has just been stolen from Ronin, the blockchain chain that is the foundation for the popular crypto game Axie Infinity. Last night, Sky Mavis, the operator of the Ronin blockchain and the Axie Infinity game, announced this vulnerability and froze transactions, including deposits and withdrawals through this blockchain.
Sky Mavis said it is working with law enforcement agencies to recover 173,600 ETH (currently equivalent to $600 million) and 25.5 million USDC (1 USD parity stablecoin). The entire amount of this cryptocurrency was stolen by hackers and withdrawn from the network on March 23 – a week ago.
According to Sky Mavis, the hacker used hacked private keys to compromise transaction validation nodes in the blockchain network. That allows hackers to silently withdraw large amounts of ETH and USDC from the network without anyone knowing. That is part of the reason why almost a week after this incident, the incident was discovered when a certain user tried to withdraw 5,000 ETH through the Ronin bridge.
However, Sky Mavis said that the NFT Axie tokens that players must purchase to gain access to Axie Infinity are not affected by this attack. In addition, the SLP and AXS cryptocurrencies used for fighting and breeding cartoon characters in the game are also not affected. But the freezing of transactions also makes it impossible for players to deposit and withdraw money from this game.
In addition, the biggest impact from this attack is to raise questions about the security of the Ronin blockchain. Like many proof-of-stake blockchains, Ronin uses validator nodes, which consume less energy than proof-of-concept blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. These nodes will take care of transaction review to validate network entry and authorization signatures, as well as reject inappropriate transactions.
Using fewer nodes makes this blockchain faster and more energy efficient – but this attack shows it also poses a security risk if a significant number of nodes are compromised for unauthorized withdrawals. out of the system without anyone knowing.
According to Sky Mavis, the attack on the Ronin blockchain was in part because last November the company created a shortcut to mitigate the “massive user workload” on its network – months later. as the game grew explosively in the Philippines and many other countries as players looked to it as a full-time job.
The system was shut down in December, but licensed operations on it were not revoked. In addition to compromising the four nodes owned by Sky Mavis, the hacker also exploited them to gain access to a community-owned Axie DAO node. After compromising 5 of the 9 validating nodes, the hacker can overwrite any transaction and withdraw any funds they want.
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at Blogtuan.info – Source: genk.vn – Read the original article here
