Crypto Hacked for Over $47M in Weeklong Breach Spree
A series of high-profile hacks has left the crypto space reeling after over $47 million was lost in a week. The breaches occurred at multiple exchanges and protocols, including AFX Trade, Wanchain, Verus, Allbridge Core, B² Network, Lien Finance, and Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev's X account.
The largest incident hit AFX Trade on July 22, with an attacker draining the exchange of $24.15 million in USDC through a bridge exploit on Arbitrum. The funds were then bridged to Ethereum and swapped for ETH, with PeckShield tracking the wallet under active surveillance.
A second breach occurred at Wanchain's Cardano Bridge, resulting in the theft of approximately 515.2 million NIGHT tokens worth $10 million. According to BlockSec, a non-injective signed-message encoding flaw in the TreasuryCheck validator allowed the attacker to reuse signatures and exploit field-boundary ambiguity.
The Verus Ethereum Bridge was drained for the second time in two months, with an attacker siphoning roughly $7.54 million in assets on July 23 by abusing the same import path used in a previous breach. The B² Network also reported a loss of $3.86 million after an attacker seized upgrade authority over the network's staking contract.
The series of hacks highlights vulnerabilities in key management and permission scoping, with security experts calling for improved protocols to protect against these types of attacks. Steven Goldfeder, Co-Founder of Offchain Labs, clarified that Arbitrum's core infrastructure was not compromised, but rather AFX Trade's own third-party bridge setup.