Hacker Steals R$ 22 Million in Attack on Terra Blockchain
The attack resulted in the theft of 60 million ASTRO tokens
Hacker Steals R$ 22 Million in Attack on Terra Blockchain
The attack resulted in the theft of 60 million ASTRO tokens and caused the currency to drop by 50% since then. The Terra blockchain, known for being the network of the defunct cryptocurrency LUNA, was halted early Wednesday morning (31st) after a hacker attack drained millions of tokens held on the network.
In a post on X, Terra announced that the blockchain would be halted at block 11430400 to allow validators to apply an emergency patch to resolve the exploit.
After the blockchain halt, the network resumed block production around 1:19 AM (Brasília time), after validators, holding over 67% of the network's voting power, updated their nodes to block the attack.
According to blockchain security firm Beosin, the attack drained more than $4 million (R$ 22 million) in bridge tokens—which connect different networks—including 60 million ASTRO tokens and 2.7 BTC, as well as $3.5 million in USDC and $500,000 in USDT.
Following the exploit, the price of Astroport's ASTRO token plummeted to a historic low of $0.01314 and is currently trading at $0.0218, a drop of more than 53% on the day, according to CoinGecko data.
Terra's LUNA token, on the other hand, fell 2.7% on the day to $0.3944, after hitting $0.385 shortly after the attack.
How did the attack happen?
According to Beosin, the attack exploited a known vulnerability and involved deploying a malicious CosmWasm contract. This risk had been previously disclosed and involves a “reentrancy vulnerability in the ibc-hooks timeout callback,” part of the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol used to initiate contract calls and enable exchanges between networks.
The Terra (LUNA) token, also known as Terra 2.0, is a hard fork derived from the original blockchain, named Terra Classic (LUNC), following the collapse of the Terra ecosystem in 2022.
