Verus Ethereum Bridge Hit by $7.54 Million Attack

Verus Ethereum Bridge experienced a security breach on July 23, resulting in the theft of $7.54 million worth of cryptocurrency assets. This marks the second major attack the protocol has faced in two months. The attacker exploited the bridge's submitImports function to trigger payments on the Ethereum side without locking assets on the Verus blockchain, withdrawing funds from the bridge's reserves. The attack occurred at 03:45 UTC and involved the theft of 1,137 ETH along with tBTC, USDC, USDT, EURC, MKR, and scrvUSD. The total value of the stolen assets was estimated at $7.54 million. The attacker quickly swapped the seized tokens on decentralized exchanges, consolidating them into approximately 3,916 ETH. The routing of some funds through Tornado Cash complicated the tracking of the assets. Blockaid noted that the latest attack bears similarities to the incident in May, targeting the same type of vulnerability but using a different attacker's wallet. The Verus team halted all bridges while the investigation is ongoing, but has yet to share an official compensation plan.