Cross-Chain Bridge Nomad Loses $190 Million in Crypto Heist

The cross-chain token bridge Nomad was attacked on Monday (August 1) and hackers managed to siphon $190 million from the protocol, draining a great majority of the funds. This attack was the ninth-biggest crypto heist of all time.

Security experts at Certik, the blockchain auditing firm, published an incident report describing what happened. It stated: "The vulnerability was in the initialization process where the 'committedRoot' is set as ZERO. Therefore, the attackers were able to bypass the message verification process and drain the tokens from the bridge contract." 

Certik added: "The exploit occurred when a routine upgrade allowed verification messages to be bypassed on Nomad. Attackers abused this to copy/paste transactions and were able to drain the bridge of nearly all funds before it could be stopped."

In recent years, there have been frequent cases of hackers attacking the blockchain. At the end of March, Axie Infinity's cross-chain bridge Ronin was hacked for over $600 million, which is the most lost crypto heist so far this year. In June, Horizon, the Harmony blockchain bridge, was also attacked, losing about $100 million worth of digital coins.