Cosmos Hacker's Big Score Falls Flat Amid Liquidity Collapse

A hacker exploited a vulnerability in the EVM module of Cosmos to move $50 million in NES tokens from Nesa Chain to Ethereum, but their actual haul was much lower due to liquidity collapse.

The attacker used a sophisticated balance exploit to inflate a balance on Nesa Chain by 200 times before bridging the tokens back. When they attempted to sell the tokens on decentralized exchanges, extreme slippage consumed nearly the entire position, leaving a net gain of just $60,000 against the $255,000 invested.

Cosmos Labs disclosed the incident and recommended that affected chains halt their validators immediately. The team instructed any network running a module version below v0.6.2 or v0.7.2 to halt and apply the corresponding patches.