Verus bridge loses $11.58M

Verus’s bridge to Ethereum was exploited on May 18, allowing an attacker to remove about $11.58 million from the protocol’s reserves, according to Blockaid, PeckShield and multiple published incident reports. The stolen assets included 103.57 tBTC, 1,625 ETH and roughly 147,659 USDC, Cointelegraph and The Block reported, citing the security firms. PeckShield said the attacker later swapped the proceeds into about 5,402 ETH, which onchain reports valued at roughly $11.4 million. Verus developers said in their Discord channel that the Verus network had halted as they investigated the incident. ### How did the attacker get money out of the bridge? Blockaid said the exploit used a fake or forged cross-chain transfer message that made the Ethereum-side bridge contract treat an unauthorized withdrawal as valid. Cointelegraph, citing Blockaid, said the attacker “deceiv[ed] the protocol into believing transfer instructions were real,” which caused the bridge to send reserve assets to the attacker’s wallet. The Block also cited GoPlus as saying the attacker appeared to send a low-value transaction to the bridge contract and call a function that batch-transferred reserve assets to the drainer wallet. (cointelegraph.com) Halborn, in a technical write-up published May 18, said the core issue was a validation gap: neither side of the bridge enforced that the input amount on Verus matched the payout amount on Ethereum. Halborn said the transfer blob contained about $0.01 of inputs on the Verus side but instructed the bridge to release roughly $11.58 million on Ethereum. The firm said the missing check sat in a function called `checkCCEValues`, which should have rejected the mismatch. (cointelegraph.com) ### What exactly was stolen? PeckShield’s accounting, as reported by The Block and Cointelegraph, put the drained assets at 103.6 tBTC, 1,625 ETH and about 147,000 USDC. Those assets were then swapped into Ether, leaving about 5,402 ETH in the wallet identified by security researchers. Memeburn separately reported the same approximate total loss of $11.58 million and said Blockaid had flagged the drain while it was still in progress. (halborn.com) The Block reported that Blockaid identified one attacker-linked address and one wallet holding the stolen funds. It also said PeckShield traced the attacker’s initial funding to 1 ETH sent through Tornado Cash about 14 hours before the exploit. That detail has appeared in several follow-on reports, though Verus had not publicly confirmed those wallet attributions in the material reviewed. ### Why are researchers focused on “validation” rather than a key compromise? (theblock.co) Cointelegraph reported that Blockaid explicitly ruled out several other attack paths, including an ECDSA bypass, a notary key compromise and a parser or hash-binding bug. Instead, Blockaid said the flaw was “a missing source-amount validation” in the bridge logic. Halborn’s review reached a similar conclusion, saying the smart contracts largely behaved as written but accepted an unbalanced transaction because the protocol did not verify that the value coming in matched the value going out. (theblock.co) That distinction matters because the reports point to business-logic failure rather than stolen validator keys. In Halborn’s account, the attack succeeded with a real blob hash and valid proof structure, while the economic mismatch inside the payload went unchecked. ### What did Verus say after the exploit? The Verus team said in its Discord channel, according to The Block, that the Verus network had halted, with most block-generating nodes taking themselves offline after encountering effects of the attack. (cointelegraph.com) The team said developers were investigating how the exploit was carried out and were determining next steps. The Block said the Verus-Ethereum bridge had launched in October 2023. (halborn.com) As of the published reports reviewed here, Verus had not issued a fuller public postmortem confirming the root cause, recovery plan or any timeline for restoring bridge operations. The next concrete milestone is the developers’ promised update on the attack path and next steps, which the team said it was preparing in Discord as the network remained halted. (theblock.co)