Wormhole Attackers Just Transferred 2.9M USDC to a New Ethereum Wallet Address

Recently, 2.9 million USDC were transferred by wormhole attackers to a fresh Ethereum wallet address. The initial gas payment came from a previously designated wallet address.

The largest known attack occurred against the Solana project on February 2. The project lost $326 million due to the attack.

An attacker can initially get around Wormhole's defense mechanism (known as Wormhole Guardians) by using the SignatureSet (signature set) generated in a prior transaction. These Wormhole Guardians keep an eye on connected chains and verify data and occurrences. To put it another way, Guardians oversee the exchange of data between each blockchain. Guardians verify that the tokens are generated accurately before sending them to another chain. They accomplish this by confirming the tokens' secp256k1 curve signatures.

With false information, the attacker made a fraudulent Instruction Silver account. The signatures were forged using transferred tokens that had previously been legitimate. As a result, every signature in the charset is flagged as correct, indicating that every signature is legitimate.

At the same time, it's conceivable that the overall arbitrage profit will exceed $13 million.

Regulators are concerned about the effect that these stablecoins will have on established financial markets, which is why the hackers took these acts. Issuers will be forced to sell off the assets held in reserve, which will entail a sizable quantity of U.S. dollars, when numerous users attempt to exchange digital currency for fiat money. It will sell Treasury notes.

“And a large volume of redemptions, even in a fairly liquid market, can create turmoil in the underlying securities market. And how important the Treasury securities market is to the overall financial system in the U.S… I think regulators are rightly concerned.”

-Eswar Prasad, professor of economics at Cornell University said to CNBC