XLink, a well-established Bitcoin blockchain bridge, is preparing to make a comeback following its shutdown on May 15 due to a $10 million hack. The security breach affected XLink’s Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain (BSC) endpoints. The breach was disclosed by the XLink team on May 15, and operations are set to resume on May 17.
The attack involved compromised private keys obtained through a phishing scheme, which allowed the attacker to take control of the BSC and Ethereum endpoints and withdraw approximately $4.3 million without authorization. However, XLink claims that a white hat hacker managed to recover the stolen assets.
Cointelegraph reached out to XLink for comment but did not receive a response before publication. According to the company’s official statement, only the BSC and Ethereum endpoints were affected by the exploit.
Although the BSC funds have been recovered, around $5 million worth of LunarCrush tokens remain locked on the Ethereum blockchain. XLink is working closely with the LunarCrush team to secure these funds, and the majority of the $5 million has been either recovered or secured.
Following the initial incident, the XLink team promptly suspended all operations on the bridge in order to conduct a thorough investigation. The investigation was conducted in collaboration with security partners, including Ancilia, and liaisons from the Binance team.
XLink is urging all users who interacted with the compromised contracts to revoke any approved spending limits. Detailed instructions and links have been provided for ETH and BSC users to mitigate further risk to their funds. Users who fail to do so are at risk of losing their funds to the attacker.
In another recent exploit, pump.fun, a Solana memecoin creation tool, was targeted by a former employee who allegedly defrauded the firm of nearly $2 million through a “bonding curve” attack. Pump.fun has stated that the protocol’s internal systems are now secure, and victims of the incident will have their liquidity fully restored.
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