Initia reports second exploit in three weeks, $3.27M stolen
Initia reported that an attacker stole $3.27 million in crypto assets after compromising its cloud infrastructure, marking the blockchain’s second exploit in less than three weeks.
Initia confirmed Wednesday that an attacker had compromised its cloud infrastructure and stolen about $3.27 million in crypto assets. The incident is the layer-1 blockchain’s second security exploit in less than three weeks.
The attacker gained unauthorized access Monday through a command-injection attack involving a compromised Google Cloud Platform key. The breach exposed environment variables that provided access to Initia’s GitHub and cloud accounts, as well as additional credentials.
The attacker used that access to reach Anvil, a platform that hosts rollups on the Initia network. The attacker then approved fraudulent Inter-Blockchain Communication withdrawals from five rollups, releasing assets held in the network’s escrow accounts.
About $2.16 million of the stolen assets remains frozen on Initia’s halted network. The attacker sold some assets on Initia’s decentralized exchange and withdrew 13,400 TIA, 8,000 USDC.inj and 597,000 Noble USDC. No INIT tokens were withdrawn.
Initia halted its layer-1 blockchain Tuesday after identifying the incident. The network plans to restore the backing of affected assets. Recovery efforts are continuing with law enforcement and security partners.
The incident follows an Oct. 23 exploit in which an attacker drained about $2.7 million from Initia. That attack used a vulnerability in the blockchain’s MoveVM script cache. The flaw allowed malicious code to bypass security checks and create token balances that were not backed by assets. The unbacked tokens were then bridged out of the network.
Reviewed and fact-checked by Alex Panasenko on November 11.
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