NEAR Intents Hacked for $3.8 Million in Omni Deposit Bug Exploit

NEAR Intents suffered a major exploit on Thursday, with an attacker draining about $3.8 million through a bug in its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure.

The flaw allowed the attacker to drain funds from NEAR Intents' hot wallet on BNB Smart Chain, which were then bridged into Bitcoin via KuCoin exchange.

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin stated that SHIELD, the AI security layer on Intents, detected the outlier behavior and paused the service. The exploit was isolated to USDT on BNB Smart Chain and was fixed within an hour of detection.

General manager Alex Shevchenko has given the attacker 48 hours to return the funds under responsible disclosure, warning that law enforcement and blockchain analytics firms are working together to trace the stolen funds.