More than a year after suspected private key hacks, the “Bitcoin Defi” platform Alex Protocol was again exploited, this time estimated at $14 million.
The team first announced a security incident following reports of hacks circulating on X before publishing a more detailed incident report. The project’s website remains “under maintenance.”
Read more: At least $25 million lost in three incidents on a busy day.
This report points to the problem of correctly identifying failed transactions with Stack, a Layer 2 scaling solution focusing on defi in Bitcoin networks.
This allowed the attacker to bypass the checks and withdraw the funds using data from the failed transaction.
According to Quillaudits, a “partial loss of funds” is an estimated $14 million. It was in the stolen token 63.5 Wrap Bitcoin (ABTC and SBTC)both fell sharply when sold by hackers.
Similarly, Stacks’ STX values have dropped by around 10% on the day, with the platform’s own Alex Token exceeding 50%.
Other stack-based projects have confirmed that the exploits are included in the Alex protocol, but Pontis has stopped the bridge to include funds within the network, and Bitflow, the Exchange Aggregator for Stacks, is removing the affected pool from the route.
Read more: App Store’s fake crypto wallets emitted $120K for four years.
Last May, $4.3 million was removed from Alex Protocol’s Xlink Bridge, which connects the project to Binance’s BNB chain after Certik suspected it was a secret important compromise.
Despite security upgrades and subsequent migrations in exchanges and token contracts, this change appears to have proven to be clearly insufficient to prevent today’s more expensive attacks.
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