Initia Confirms Another Hack as Attackers Steal $3.27 Million in Three Weeks

Blockchain network Layer-1 called Initia announced on Wednesday that its platform has faced its second hack in less than three weeks when the hacker stole $3.27 million (roughly Rs. 29.9 crore) worth of cryptocurrencies by hacking the platform's cloud environment. In Wednesday's update, Initia stated that the attack occurred on Monday through a command injection attack, which was done using a compromised Google Cloud Platform key. The attacker had access to Initia's environment variables, which gave him/her access to Initia's GitHub and cloud accounts, where he/she obtained more credentials.

Compromised Cloud Credentials Expose Initia's Rollup Infrastructure to Further Exploitation

Initia stated that the hacker gained access to Anvil, the network for rollups, where fraudulent Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) withdrawals were made through five rollups. This led to the release of escrowed funds on the blockchain network. According to Initia, approximately $2.16 million (roughly Rs. 20 crore) worth of the stolen funds are still being held up on their network, which is currently shut down. This is because the attacker traded the assets on their decentralised exchange and siphoned off 13,400 TIA, 8,000 USDC.inj, and 597,000 Noble USDC from the exchange.

Initia stopped its layer-1 on Tuesday and has stated that it plans to revive support for the impacted assets. The blockchain said that the efforts to recover are still ongoing through its law enforcement and security partners. This comes on the back of an attack on October 23, where hackers were able to drain around $2.7 million (roughly Rs. 25 crore) following a hack of the MoveVM script cache of Initia's code, which resulted in the creation of unbacked token balances that were bridged out of the blockchain network.

The native token of Initia was recognised within the same period when the blockchain network had to go through its second security suspension. As per the reports given by CoinGecko market analysis, the INIT coin was being traded for approximately $0.2057 (Rs. 1.8), and this was a 61.31 percent increase compared to the prices during the trading session. 

While Initia was battling this breach, Binance, which is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, was hacked for more than $6 billion (roughly Rs. 56,970 crore), making it the biggest ever cryptocurrency theft in history. Binance estimates the value of the total losses due to the attack at around $6.3 billion (roughly Rs. 59,818.5 crore). According to Binance, about $3 billion (roughly Rs. 28,485 crore) worth of cryptoassets have been frozen, including $2.3 billion (roughly Rs. 21,838.50 crore) worth of USDT and USDC stablecoins. This implies that the token issuers have blocked any transactions from the blockchain addresses in question.