Harmony Protocol yesterday announced on Twitter a $1M bounty for information on the $100 million crypto hack from its Horizon Bridge in an attempt to recover the funds. In addition, the network assured to forfeit criminal charges against the hacker.
On Thursday, a malicious attacker exploited a vulnerability to siphon off tokens from Harmony’s Horizon Bridge – a cross-chain interoperability platform that transfers crypto-assets from one blockchain to another.
The hacker immediately swapped the $100 million worth of Wrapped Ethereum (WETH), SUSHI, Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), and AAVE for ETH.
Since then, several national authorities and cyber security firms, including The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), have been working closely to identify the culprit and recover the stolen assets.
Harmony was forced to halt the operations of Horizon Bridge after the hack. Its native ONE token slipped over 12% on the news of the hack and is trading about 8% lower than its price before the hack at the time of writing.
Several cross-chain platforms have been a target of hackers recently. Harmony is another addition to a growing list of cross-chain bridge attacks, including the $80 million hack from Qubit Finance’s bridge, Wormhole bridge’s $320 million exploit, and the $622 million theft from Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge.
The bounty is seen as an endeavor to encourage the hacker to return the stolen funds. Last month, Optimism Foundation successfully recovered stolen funds from a whitehat hacker who retained 2 million OP tokens as a bounty.
Similarly, a hacker returned funds worth $610 million from an attack on Poly Network after a $500,000 bounty was announced. The network even offered a job to the hacker.
However, in most instances, such as with Wormhole and Ronin, hacked funds remain unrecovered.
