Arbitrum offers 400 ETH reward to prevent $470M hack

September 21, 2022

On September 19th, Arbitrum, one of Ethereum's most popular layer 2 solutions, paid 400 ETH to a white hat hacker for discovering a potential vulnerability in their code.

A white hat hacker known as Riptide on Twitter, discovered a vulnerability in smart contracts written in Solidity.

Riptide said the “multi-million-dollar vulnerability” could affect anyone looking to swap funds from Ethereum to Arbitrum Nitro.

Weeks before the Arbitrum Nitro code release, hacker thoroughly scanned it and checked contracts to "see if the update was successful."

Riptide has noticed some bugs that prevent the bridge from working properly. Upon further investigation, Riptide found that his sequencer was lagging in his inbox.

After rescanning the contract, Riptide found a bug in the inbox sequencer that allowed Riptide or another malicious hacker to detect ETH deposits coming into the wallet via the L1 to L2 bridge.

In March 2022, Arbitrum became a victim as a group of hackers stole more than 100 NFTs worth at least $1.4 million from TreasureDAO.