FBI Investigates Horizon’s $100 Million Hack

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and various cybersecurity companies have begun investigating Harmony Protocol’s $100 million cross-bridge hacking of Horizon.

Harmony Protocol announced that it was attacked this morning, alerting exchanges to the suspect’s blockchain wallet address and pausing the Horizon Bridge.

Horizon Bridge allows users to transfer cryptocurrencies from Harmony’s blockchain layer 1 to Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Bitcoin.

Harmony Protocol says exploiting does not affect Bitcoin demand, where assets are stored in decentralized warehouses.

CEO PeckShield Xuxian Jiang said the hack may have occurred due to a compromised private key.

The Harmony hack came after attacks against blockchain players like Wormhole and Ronin Bridge.

Horizon’s incident at a glance

According to the examples of hackers provided by Harmony, the attacker withdrew more than 13,100 ETH (worth 14.1 million USD), 592 WBTC (12.4 million USD), 9.9 million USDT, 41.2 million USDC, 6 million DAI, 5.5 million BUSD, 5.6 million FRAX, 84.6 million AAG (1.3 million USD), 110,000 FXS (607 thousand USD), 415,000 SUSHI (518 thousand USD), among many other ERC-20 tokens.

Hacker then converted the ERC-20 to ETH tokens and collected a wallet. The wallet currently holds more than 85,867 ETH, worth more than $98 million.

In addition, the attack took place between 06:15 – 06:30 PM on June 23 GMT+7. Still, it was only announced by Harmony on June 24 at 06:15 AM, i.e., 12 hours later, facilitating the hackers to evacuate the majority of ERC-20 tokens, leaving only a large amount of ETH in the wallet.

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