Cyber Robbery Gets Sadistic, Crypto Companies Report 100 Million US Dollars Stolen

Photo by olieman.eth on Unsplash

JAKARTA - US crypto company Harmony admits a thief took $100 million in digital coins from one of its main products. And this is a series of cyber robberies in the sector that hackers have long targeted.

Harmony is developing blockchain for so-called decentralized finance – peer-to-peer sites that offer loans and other services without traditional gatekeepers like banks – and non-exchangeable tokens.

The California-based company said the theft hit its Horizon "bridge", a tool for transferring crypto between various blockchains - the underlying software used by digital tokens such as bitcoin and ether.

Theft has long plagued companies in the crypto sector, with blockchain bridges increasingly being targeted. More than $1 billion has been stolen from bridges so far in 2022, according to London-based blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, reported from Antara, Saturday, June 25.

Harmony tweeted that it was "working with national authorities and forensic specialists to identify the culprits and retrieve the stolen funds", without providing further details.

In a statement, Harmony added that they have a global team "working around the clock to address this issue".

"We are currently narrowing down the potential attack vector while working to identify the culprit," said a spokesperson, adding that Harmony had tried to contact the hackers via transactions to their crypto wallet addresses.

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Elliptic, which tracks publicly visible blockchain data, said the hackers stole several different cryptocurrencies from Harmony, including ether, Tether, and USD Coin, which they then exchanged for ether using a so-called decentralized exchange.

In March, hackers stole about $615 million worth of cryptocurrency from Ronin Bridge, which was used to transfer crypto in and out of the game Axie Infinity. The United States linked North Korean hackers to the theft.