Terra has once again erupted as the talk of the town with its latest debacle. The network had to temporarily shut down operations following an exploit. The attack caused the loss tokens worth $4 million. Terra’s official X account revealed that the the network was halted at block height 11430400. This means that transactions made by users will no longer be processed. But, the network was up and running following an “emergency” chain upgrade.
04:19 UTC marked the completion of the fix. According to a post on the X, validators who are the entities that support the network and hold over 67% of the voting power on Terra, upgraded their nodes to stop the vulnerability from happening again.
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Looking Into The Hack
The attacker reportedly took advantage of a weakness in the IBC hooks third-party module, which is used for token transfers and cross-chain contract interactions. Through the use of this flaw, the attacker was able to bridged assets. This further had an effect on tokens like Astroport. Prominent stablecoin, USD Coin [USDC] wasn’t spared either.
Security company Beosin calculated that the attack took $3.5 million worth of the USDC stablecoin, $500,000 worth of the USDT stablecoin, 2.7 Bitcoin (BTC), and more than 60 million worth of Astroport’s ASTRO.
This exploit caused commotion in the market. The price of ASTRO took a major hit. The asset dipped by over 56.5% down to a low of $0.0211. The reportedly stolen 60 million Astro tokens were valued about $2.7 million before the exploit came to light. But they are currently only worth about $1.08 million. Terra [LUNA] also saw a relatively small dip of 2.9% and was trading at $0.3958, at press time.
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