Nomad Bridge Recovers $22 Million After Exploit

Nomad Bridge recovers $22 million after exploit that allowed hackers to steal a total of $190 million. The recovery of the money comes after Nomad asked for the hackers to return what they stole with the caveat that they will get to keep 10% of the money.

Nomad Bridge Recovers $22 Million After Exploit

Data from Etherscan shows that as a result of the team’s reward offer, $22.4 million, or 11.7 percent of the $190 million heist, has been given back to Nomad.

The $9 million that ethical hackers gave back to Nomad on Wednesday has already been more than doubled. After Nomad announced a 10% prize on Thursday, more money was retrieved.

The cross-chain bridge, a feature that enables users to transfer ERC-20 tokens between Ethereum, Moonbeam, Evmos, and Avalanche, was used by more than 300 addresses to steal $190 million on August 1.

A serious flaw that was made public allowed money to be siphoned out. The flaw was created by Nomad engineers during a smart-contract update.

We have been working really hard behind the scenes to coordinate the return of funds, but many bad actors are trying to take advantage of people in these challenging times.

Here's how to report bad actors 👇

— Nomad (⤭⛓🏛) (@nomadxyz_) August 7, 2022

10% Bounty Offered to White Hats

The 10 percent bounty was offered by the Nomad team on Thursday, and it would be given to anyone who sent back the stolen tokens to a specific return address.

Co-founder and CEO of Nomad Pranay Mohan made the following official statement:

“The most important thing in crypto is community, and our number one goal is restoring bridged user funds.”

In a similar line, Nomad will label any hacker as a white hat hacker if they return at least 90% of the entire amount of monies they have stolen. White hat hackers are occasionally referred to as “ethical hackers.” Although these hackers frequently use the same techniques as black hat hackers, they frequently receive permission from the site owner, making their attack lawful. Platform security is regularly enhanced using white hat techniques.

In order to “pursue all other hostile actors to the utmost extent permitted by law,” Noma “will continue to collaborate with their partners, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement, according to Mohan.

Nomad announced that it is collaborating with law enforcement on the incident investigation. It also worked together with TRM Labs, a company that performs on-chain analytics, to monitor the transfer of money between the exploited addresses.

Cybercriminals Aim for Crypto Bridges

Bridge attacks have increased in frequency in recent months as cryptocurrency users have shown a stronger desire to transfer funds between blockchains.

Despite the fact that cross-chain bridges have allowed for the proliferation of new blockchains, the effects of bridge failures can be potentially disastrous for smaller chains that rely on them for a sizeable amount of their total liquidity.

Nomad recovers just $22 million after exploit, can they recover more? We will just have to wait and see.