Wormhole Hack: Future Big Attacks On Non-Ethereum Protocols Inevitable

The global blockchain community is shocked by the recent Wormhole hack. Malicious actors have stolen $320M in ETH. It’s just the first explosion, vulnerabilities in blockchain protocols will soon result in a series of mega hacks, Solana at the greatest risk. 

Wormhole is the bridge between Solana and other DeFi networks. The project’s team has already addressed the vulnerability stating that users’ assets are in safety. It is the biggest hack in 2022 and the second biggest DeFi hack in history. The Wormhole team has restored all funds.  

Hacken CEO Dyma Budorin commented on the hack: “Wormhole incident is the first big hack of non-Ethereum protocols. It’s just a matter of time when other big protocols experience severe attacks”.

According to Dyma, security audits and pentests are the only tools to mitigate the risk of future attacks. 

Hacken team has warned the global community numerous times of the security risks attributable to major non-Ethereum protocols including Solana. Namely, we shared our security concerns during the recent Solana Breakpoint event that took place in November 2021. As we can see, not all projects have paid enough attention to security.

Dyma Budorin discussing the future of Solana (growth and risks) 

Hacken lead smart contracts auditor Evgeniy Bezuglyi agrees with the comment made by Dyma Budorin: “The Wormhole case is just the beginning of real bombing targeting non-Ethereum protocols. Although projects hold full responsibility for the security of assets at their disposal, Solana may be also blamed for providing the instrument with security flaws to its projects. Solana has not instructed projects on how to safely use it. Considering a high level of transparency in blockchain, by introducing the update, Solana demonstrated to the whole blockchain community the vulnerabilities of its instrument. Unlikely that Solana actively communicates with the projects that use this instrument”.

Based on this comment, we can see that security is always a shared responsibility. But, without any doubt, Wormhole might have prevented the incident by auditing the instruments it used. 

Wormhole Hack: key lesson learned

A detailed analysis of the Wormhole hack you can find in this Twitter thread. We would like to focus your attention on one crucial point:

All accounts involved in the processing of a transaction need to be validated. Even when it seems that an account is to be validated by any other parties except for you, don’t hesitate to validate it. 

Wormhole Hack is likely to be just a prelude to mega hacks on Solana. It’s not a horror story, it’s a call to action, call to security.

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