Acala Attacked By Hackers, aUSD Loses Peg
- A suspicious activity took place on the Acala network, and it seems that the hackers have made away with a significant amount of aUSD tokens, a stablecoin.
- The initial investigation reveals that hackers exploited a vulnerability to drain aUSD from the pool and it seems that over 1 billion aUSD tokens have been stolen.
In a recent turn of events, Acala, a platform that is built on Polkadot, ranked among the top blockchain networks, has been hacked, and according to initial investigations, hackers took advantage of a vulnerability that allowed them to mint huge quantities of aUSD.
The attack was confirmed by the Acala team and they are now investigating the situation. It seems that the funds are still on the chain, as pointed out by Twitter conversations and the team is working on not letting the attackers transfer their funds.
“We have noticed a configuration issue of the Honzon protocol which affects aUSD. We are passing an urgent vote to pause operations on Acala, while we investigate and mitigate the issue. We will report back as we return to normal network operation,”
Acala said in its most recent Tweet.
An update on the same can be expect very soon and BitcoinWisdom will keep you updated with the same. However, according to a Twitter user by the username @0xTaylor, the attackers wallet currently holds more than a billion aUSD tokens, (1.267 billion aUSD to be exact).
One of the Twitter users pointed that the attack on Acala marked a failure of the Polkadot ecosystem as it is considered to be one of the most secure blockchain networks in the crypto space.
0xTaylor was quick to suggest that this is not true and pointed out that “they’ve contained the exploit (prevented them from transferring these assets out) and will probably revert state like they did with Karura last year.”
Additionally, blockchain security firm PeckShield also confirmed the attack on the network but was light on details as the platform itself hasn’t provided anything new in the past 2 hours from the time of writing.
The native token of the platform, ACA has dropped by 11% in the last 24 hours and it seems that if the funds are being transferred, we can expect additional drops as well. Moreover, the aUSD stablecoin has crashed as well due to excessive minting caused by the attackers.
According to CoinMarketCap, the aUSD token has dropped by around 18.26% in the last 24 hours and it is very much possible that the depeg is never restored as happened in the case of UST. However, the situation seems much different from that time.
Acala was built on the Polkadot ecosystem to host an array of financial applications that make use of smart contract technology, interoperable cross-chain functionality, and robust security protocols. The platform is known for bringing lending, borrowing, and extensive stablecoin functionality to the Polkadot ecosystem.
The applications on the platform make use of two main protocols: Homa and Honzon and it was the latter that was vulnerable to the attacks according to initial investigation done by Acala.
A crypto journalist with over 3 years of experience in DeFi, NFT, metaverse, etc. Parth has worked with major media outlets in the crypto and finance world and has gained experience and expertise in crypto culture after surviving bear and bull markets over the years.
