Crypto News: Sky Mavis Offers $1M Bug Bounties In Wake Of $600M Ronin Hack

How Harmony's Horizon Bridge Was Hacked For $100M

Crypto News – Sky Mavis and Ronin Network have vowed to improve their smart contracts. Give hefty bug bounties and beef up security following the $600 million hack late last month.

As previously reported by iexclusivenews, an exploit for 173,600 Ether (ETH) and 25.5 million USD Coin (USDC). Valued more than $612 million was discovered on the Ethereum sidechain designed for the popular NFT game Axie Infinity.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) blamed the attack on Lazurus. A North Korean-based and the state-sponsored hacking gang. And issued a warning to other crypto and blockchain companies earlier this month.

Ronin confirmed the platform adjustments in a post-mortem report published yesterday, adding that all user funds are being returned and promising that this “never happens again.”

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What You Need To Know About The Hack

The hack was the result of a spear-phishing attack on a former Sky Mavis employee (developers of Axie Infinity).

The bad actor was able to leverage the employee’s credentials to access Sky Mavis’s four validator nodes out of a total of nine in the Axie/Ronin ecosystem.

This by itself was not enough to do any damage. But “the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node. Which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator.”

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“This traces back to November 2021 when Sky Mavis requested help from the Axie DAO to distribute free transactions due to an immense user load. The Axie DAO allow listed Sky Mavis to sign various transactions on its behalf. This was discontinued in December 2021, but the allow list access was not revoked,” the report reads.

Both Sky Mavis and the Ronin Network are undergoing significant changes as a result of the hack.

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What Ronin Network Is Saying

The Ronin Network intends to reopen its bridge by mid-to-late May. With Binance providing withdrawal and deposit infrastructure for Axie users until then.

The team is around 80% done with the Ronin bridge smart contracts upgrade. They’ll be redesigning the backend. Transferring all outstanding withdrawals. And providing a validator dashboard that “allows for approving huge transactions and adding/removing new validators,” according to the team.

“The Ronin Network bridge is currently being redesigned and will open once we are confident that it can stand the test of time. We initially expected to be able to deploy the upgrade by the end of April, but this is not a process that we can afford to rush.”

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What Sky Mavis Plans To Do

Sky Mavis will beef up its security measures by enlisting the support of “top tier security specialists,” undertaking contract audits, and putting in place stronger internal procedures including training classes to “fight external attacks.”

It will also greatly increase its node count to help decentralize the project. Sky Mavis plans to expand the number of children from nine to eleven in the next three months. In the long run, the initiative hopes to have more than 100 nodes.

Sky Mavis will also provide up to $1 million in bug bounties to any white hat hackers who can uncover new vulnerabilities.

“We recognize the importance and value of security researchers’ efforts in helping keep our community safe. Sky Mavis is offering bounties of up to $1 million to encourage responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities.”