Blockchain platform Ronin Network fell prey to the threat actors who made away USD 625 million worth of cryptocurrencies. The company announced this shocking development on Tuesday, and this has become the world’s biggest crypto heist.

Ronin came forth that the unidentified threat actors broke into their servers on March 23 and made away with 173,600 ether tokens and USD 25.5 million-coin tokens. The value of the stolen funds is at USD 625 million at the current exchange rates.

The blockchain platform power Axie Infinity game as the latter employs non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Ronin elaborated in a blog post that the threat actors got their hands on private keys and used them to gain access to cryptocurrencies stored on the blockchain. They further detailed that the hacker gained entry into their network by exploiting the network validator nodes used for Sky Mavis, the game producers of Axie Infinity.

Ronin stated, “We are working directly with various government agencies to ensure the criminals get brought to justice.” Additionally, Etherscan observed that the Ethereum address used by the hacker was relatively young as it was just one week old. Furthermore, the hacker initiated the hack after it got Ether from the Binance exchange. Finally, Etherscan noted that the Ether address houses most of the stolen stash.

The attack led to Ronin suspending the activities of Ronin Bridge and Katana’s Automated Market Maker (AMM) until the crypto heist was properly investigated.

Useful Link: Cryptocurrency Heists, Ransomware Payments to Drop 30% by 2024!

Aftermath

Chief Operating Officer of Sky Mavis, Aleksander Leonard Larsen said, “We fully commit to reimbursing our players as soon as possible.”

“We’re still working on a solution, that is an ongoing discussion.” Larsen went on to say that the cryptocurrency stash that the hackers stole constituted the deposits of players and cryptocurrency speculators of Axie Infinity Treasury revenue. 56,000 ether tokens that were stolen by the hacker belonged to Axie Infinity. The COO also said that they don’t suspect insider involvement in this theft.

The crypto heist also outpoints the flaws existing in the bridge connections. The codes for these protocols aren’t examined with due attention, and this aspect allows hackers to find the gaps to enter the network. It is nebulous who is in control of this bridge and who validates the transactions on these bridges.

Ronin’s network token, RON, fell massively due to the hack. It plummeted 21 percent at one instance, as per CoinMarketCap data. Experts observed that Ronin’s bridge setup was to blame as one only needed to take control of five validator nodes to execute the hack. As a result, Ronin decided to increase the validator threshold to eight from the existing five.

However, this doesn’t solve the issue of how to secure blockchain transactions. This is where Stealthlabs steps in and addresses the issue. We audit the codes and identify the security gaps. So, reach out to us without further ado and walk away with a solution that protects your organizational assets.

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