HARMONY has halted its two-way cross-chain bridge to Ethereum, Horizon, after a hacker heisted a whopping $100 million worth of digital assets on 24th June 2022. Bridges allow users to transfer tokens from one blockchain to a different. They’ve become a first-rate target for hackers because of vulnerabilities in their underlying code.

The Harmony official account tweeted late Wednesday “The Harmony team has identified a theft occurring this morning on the Horizon bridge amounting to approximately $100MM”. Preliminary investigation revealed that the alleged address made 11 transactions from the bridge for various tokens. Then the individual sent tokens to a special wallet to swap for ETH on the Uniswap decentralized exchange (DEX) after which the attacker sent ETH back to the first wallet.

Further investigation uncovered 12 attack transactions and three attack addresses. Via these transactions, the attacker ripped off various tokens on the bridge including ETH, USDC, WBTC, USDT, DAI, BUSD, AAG, FXS, AAVE, and WETH.

The Harmony heist adds to a negative stream of bad news in crypto lately as this attack follows a series of comparable attacks on blockchain bridges, including the Ronin Network heist during which $600 million was looted and also the $320 million worth of assets stolen from Wormhole.

Harmony also tweeted “We have begun working with national authorities and forensic specialists to spot the culprit and retrieve the stolen funds”. Because the security of Blockchain technology continues to be highly exposed, users will never enjoy 100% asset security until Blockchain security issues are fully addressed.

Featured image source: Computerworld