Over $25 Billion Of Crypto Assets At Risk, Here’s Why

Blockchain cybersecurity firm Halborn uncovers that over $25 billion of crypto assets are at risk of “zero-day” security vulnerabilities found in more than 280 blockchains. Crypto investors could end up losing billions in crypto due to hacking taking advantage of the security vulnerabilities.

In an official blog on March 13, Halborn claims that it found several critical and exploitable vulnerabilities impacting the Dogecoin open-source network last year. The Dogecoin team has since fixed the vulnerabilities reported by Halborn.

However, Halborn identified the same vulnerabilities in more than 280 other networks including Litecoin and Zcash, which have been patched. Halborn has named the “zero-day” vulnerability Rab13s, putting over $25 billion of crypto assets at risk of exploits.

Among the “zero-day” security vulnerabilities found, peer-to-peer (p2p) communication is the most critical vulnerability. Attackers can make nodes on blockchains offline by taking over consensus messages.

Another zero-day vulnerability identified impacts individual miners through an RPC vulnerability. Variants of the same zero-day vulnerability could potentially lead to denial of service (DoS) or remote code execution (RCE) attacks.

The third and last vulnerability allows attackers to execute code in the context of the user running the node through the public interface (RPC). The company believes the likelihood of this exploit is lower due to the requirement of valid credentials to execute the attack.

Halborn Urges Crypto And Blockchain Firms to Contact

Halborn has made efforts to contact the affected networks for responsible disclosure, but requests networks to contact the firm for further technical or exploit detail.

Meanwhile, Halborn recommends upgrading all UTXO-based nodes on the blockchain and completing the latest updates. Halborn is not releasing more technical details or exploit details at this time due to the severity of the issue.

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