Hacker Steals Tokens From Hedera Exploiting Smart Contract Vulnerability

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Jeff Horseman
Jeff Horseman
Jeff Horseman got into journalism because he liked to write and stunk at math. He grew up in Vermont and he honed his interviewing skills as a supermarket cashier by asking Bernie Sanders “Paper or plastic?” After graduating from Syracuse University in 1999, Jeff began his journalistic odyssey at The Watertown Daily Times in upstate New York, where he impressed then-U.S. Senate candidate Hillary Clinton so much she called him “John” at the end of an interview. From there, he went to Annapolis, Maryland, where he covered city, county and state government at The Capital newspaper. Today, Jeff writes about anything and everything. Along the way, Jeff has covered wildfires, a tropical storm, 9/11 and the Dec. 2 terror attack in San Bernardino. If you have a question or story idea about politics or the inner workings of government, please let Jeff know. He’ll do his best to answer, even if it involves a little math.
  • On March 9, Hedera successfully disabled IP proxies, cutting off network access.
  • The network’s token, Hedera (HBAR), has dropped 9% in the previous 24 hours.

The developers of the Hedera Hashgraph distributed ledger have revealed that some tokens from the network’s liquidity pool were stolen due to a smart contract vulnerability on the Hedera Mainnet. The hacker, according to Hedera, went after tokens in DEXs’ liquidity pools that used code adapted from Ethereum’s Uniswap v2 and deployed on its Hedera Token Service.

The Hedera team said that the attacker’s attempt to transfer the stolen tokens through the Hashport bridge, which included tokens from the SaucerSwap, Pangolin, and HeliSwap liquidity pools, triggered the alarm. The bridge was momentarily stopped after quick action by the operators.

Proxies Disabled After Attack Discovery

The stolen token total was not verified by Hedera. The Hedera Token Service (HTS) was modified on February 3 to support smart contract code that is compatible with Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM).

A key step in this procedure is decompiling Ethereum contract bytecode to the HTS, and here is where Hedera-based DEX SaucerSwap thinks the attack vector originated. Nevertheless, in its most recent update, Hedera does not affirm this. On March 9, Hedera successfully disabled IP proxies, cutting off network access. The group claims to have found the exploit’s “root cause” and to be “working on a remedy. 

For token holders “comfort,” the Hedera team recommended they verify their account ID and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) address balances on hashscan.io after the company disabled proxies soon after discovering the possible attack. The network’s token, Hedera (HBAR), has dropped 9% in the previous 24 hours, trading at $0.05497 as per CMC as of this writing.

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