The news of the attack has resulted in the price of the token plunging to thirty-five percent of its initial value.
Popular blockchain security firm BlockSec detected malicious activity associated with the ETHW protocol. According to a post on the company’s Twitter account, the firm detected attackers repeating the message (calldata) of the Ethereum Proof-of-stake network on the Proof-of-work blockchain.
The Ethereum and proof-of-work blockchain underwent a loss of an additional 200 ETHW tokens after replaying a message from the POS chain.
The cyberhacker, identified as 0x82fae, initially sent 200 ETHW via omni bridge of the Gnosis Chain and then repeated the same message on the PoW chain, and gained an additional two hundred ETHW. The root cause of this incident is that the bridge has failed to perfectly confirm the chain ID of the cross-chain message.
While the case is extremely new, the ETHPoW’s developer team has been defending their network by blaming the bridge for its susceptibility to fraud and not the PoW network itself. According to the team of core developers on Medium, it is said that the ETHW has implemented EIP-155 and that no attack took place from or to the ETHPoS. Having said that, the team has also reached out to Omni Bridge to convey the vulnerability of the system, but are met with no response yet.
Recently, the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake Ethereum network resulted in the branching of the ETHW protocol. While the PoS network was long in the making, it promised ninety-nine percent reduced consumption of energy using the validation consensus model.
The news of the attack has resulted in the price of the token plunging to thirty-five percent of its initial value. While the ETHW protocol is yet to inaugurate on the bigger exchanges, the token has gone live on several exchanges like FTX, Gate.io and Bybit. You can read more about the token listing in one of our previously published news articles.
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