They hacked the game Axie Infinity and took more than 600 million dollars in cryptocurrencies

Cybercriminals attacked the video game Axie Infinity, and $625 million was stolen in cryptocurrencies, as confirmed by the managers of the gaming company.

The incident happened last Wednesday: the attackers infiltrated part of Ronin, the underlying blockchain that powers the game.

In a press release, Ronin reported that on March 23, Sky Mavis's Ronin validation nodes and Axie DAO validation nodes were breached, resulting in a significant loss of funds.

The company learned about the vulnerability just a few hours ago, after a user reported that it could not withdraw 5,000 ethers using the chain bridge.

“Most of the hacked funds are still in the hacker's wallet,” the organization expelled in the publication in which it released this incident.

What happened

The company is still investigating the attack, but warned that cybercriminals obtained private “keys” to withdraw digital funds.

As they explained, cryptocurrencies were withdrawn from the Ronin Bridge in two transactions. The attacker used stolen private keys to forge withdrawals.

The validator key scheme is configured to be decentralized, so that it limits an attack vector like this, but the attacker found a backdoor through our gasless RPC node, which they abused to obtain the signature of the Axie DAO validator, as detailed from the company.

“We know trust must be earned and we are using all the resources at our disposal to implement the most sophisticated security measures and processes to prevent future attacks,” they said from the company.

They added, “We are working with judicial officials, forensic cryptographers and our investors to ensure that user funds are not lost.”

What is the game about

In Axie Infinity, players participate in battles and receive rewards that they can exchange for cryptocurrency or cash.

To play, you must purchase a minimum of three Axies, which are NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and are stored on a blockchain or blockchain

Whoever owns Axies can buy, sell or rent them to other players. Homeowners can also “breed” them to create new Axies with more value.

The game has been the fruit of controversy in the past over the money it requires to be disbursed to play. As a result of these claims, the company launched a scholarship program that links regular players who lack enough money with other users who have the funds but do not have enough skill or time to dedicate themselves to the game. In this way they manage to enhance participation in this game.

What steps the company took after learning about this incident:

1. “We moved quickly to address the incident once it became known and we are actively taking steps to protect ourselves against future attacks,” they said. In addition, to avoid further damage in the short term, they increased the validator threshold from five to eight.

2. The company is in contact with security teams at major crypto exchanges.

3. Nodes are migrating, which are completely separate from our old infrastructure.

4. They temporarily stopped the Ronin Bridge to ensure that no more attack vectors remain open. Binance also disabled its bridge to and from Ronin to add another layer of security. The bridge will be reopened later.

5. They're working with Chainalysis to monitor the stolen funds.

6. The company is already in contact with several government agencies to ensure that the criminals behind this attack are identified.

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