Top 11 DeFi Bridge Attacks of 2022: Hackers Bag Over $2 Billion

BNB Chain lost 2 million BNB coins worth $568 million in a cross-bridge exploit last week. The incident is yet another on the list of major DeFi attacks that have occurred through 2021-22, resulting in a loss of over $2 billion.

While the recent attack is reported to be due to a flaw in message verification by the validators, Blockchain security infrastructure firm BlockSec highlighted that crypto and DeFi bridges have historically been sought-after targets by attackers.

BSC Bridge: $568M

The BNB (BSC) Bridge exploit occurred due to a message verification weakness, which, according to security researcher Samczsun, happened due to an attacker finding a way to forge proof for a particular block.

At first, the platform temporarily suspended operations on the BNB Chain due to “irregular activity,” only to later confirm it was an exploit.

Nomad attacks: $200M

Back in August, hackers exploited Nomad due to a similar message verification vulnerability, but in the target chain contract, which allowed the attackers to steal around $200 million in cryptocurrency.

The incident shook the entire cryptosphere because the hackers went all the way to impersonate Nomad employees to steal even more funds.

Harmony Bridge: $100M

In June, Harmony stated that it had discovered attacks on the Horizon bridge that drained $100 million worth of various crypto assets due to a private key leak. The Horizon bridge, which connects the Harmony blockchain to Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Bitcoin, suffered a multi-sig wallet flaw that impacted about 65,000 wallets and 14 asset kinds.

Ronin Bridge: $600M

In March of this year, approximately $600 million in ETH and USDC were stolen from Ronin Network, the Ethereum-based sidechain for the well-known cryptocurrency game Axie Infinity.

The attacker allegedly used hacked private keys to fabricate bogus withdrawals from the Ronin bridge contract in two transactions.

Meter.io DeFi: $4.2M

On Feb. 5, 2022, the blockchain infrastructure business Meter, which works in the DeFi sector, lost $4.4 million in a bridge hack. The hacker reportedly swindled 1,391 ETH and 2.74 BTC after the bad actor exploited a bug introduced onto the bridge by the Meter team.

The weakness was reportedly due to a logical vulnerability in depositing funds.

Wormhole: $325M

The Wormhole protocol, a well-known cross-chain cryptocurrency link between Solana, Ethereum, Avalanche, and other chains, was hacked on Feb. 2 when approximately $325 million in wrapped ETH was stolen. In order to ensure that wETH is back