As the team behind Nomad Bridge works on relaunching the platform, a fresh movement of 1200 ETH has been noticed from one of the wallet addresses linked to the hack.
A wallet address belonging to Nomad Bridge, which faced a $190 million exploit last week, has recently moved a total of $1.57 million in ETH to the banned crypto mixer Tornado Cash.
As per the PeckShield data, attackers of the cross-chain interoperability protocol transferred 1,205 ETH (about $1.5 million) to Tornado Cash.
#PeckShieldAlert @nomadxyz_ bridge exploit related address has transferred ~1,205 $ETH (~$1.5M) to Tornado Cashhttps://t.co/tBpkQXjqDW pic.twitter.com/3308uOzMfs
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) January 9, 2023
It is clear that the attackers have once again turned active and are moving funds to crypto mixer platforms to make them untraceable. The recent activity suggests that the hacker might be cashing funds. A further look into this shows that the hacker transferred 12 batches of 100 ETH to the sanctioned mixer.
The Nomad Bridge Hack and Fund Transfer to Tornado Cash
The Nomad Bridge exploit was among the top ten largest crypto hacks that took place in 2022. On August 1, 2022, several hundred explorers flocked to steal all the total value locked in the bridge in a matter of hours after the security breach. As a result, the Nomad Bridge lost a total of $190 million in total.
The Nomad Bridge had locked tokens in a smart contract that was exploited. So far, the team at Nomad has recovered only $30 million which is quite minimal compared to the loss that the platform suffered. Bridge hacks have been quite often during the last year of 2022 with hackers stealing several hundred million dollars last year.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) witnessed major hacks throughout the last year. The hackers have been successful in exploiting the bridges connecting different blockchain platforms. In the DeFi space alone more than $3 billion worth of digital assets has been stored in 2022. After the hack back in August 2022, Nomad chief executive officer Pranay Mohan explained:
“We will not prosecute white hats. But we will continue to work with our partners, intelligence firms, and law enforcement to pursue all other malicious actors to the fullest extent under the law.”
However, over the last two weeks, the Nomad team has made an effort to relaunch the bridge. The team has been putting a lot of effort in order to recover those lost funds and implement the required adjustments in order to restart the Nomad Token Bridge. After the relaunch, holders of the madAssets will be able to use the updated bridge in order to retrieve their recovered funds.
Bhushan is a FinTech enthusiast and holds a good flair in understanding financial markets. His interest in economics and finance draw his attention towards the new emerging Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrency markets. He is continuously in a learning process and keeps himself motivated by sharing his acquired knowledge. In free time he reads thriller fictions novels and sometimes explore his culinary skills.
