The Terra blockchain halted block production for round four hours on Tuesday to patch an exploit that resulted in the theft of millions of bucks’ price of tokens.

The Terra team announced that block production may per chance per chance well well be halted in a put up on X, asserting that no transactions may per chance per chance well well be processed until validators had deployed an emergency patch to remediate a suspected exploit.

Blockchain security firm Beosin estimated that the exploiter had stolen round 60 million ASTRO, 3.5M USDC, 500,000 USDT and a pair of.7 BTC – the entire value of which exceeded $4 million at the time of the exploit. On the opposite hand, the price of ASTRO has since plummeted 55% to $0.02084.

Users who adopted the waft of funds stumbled on that the bid resembled an IBC hooks exploit that used to be flagged in April. IBC hooks is a third-celebration module primitive to permit ICS-20 token transfers to beginning contract calls.

That exploit would permit the attacker to mint tokens by taking supreme thing in regards to the flaw in the contract into the hacker’s wallet. One particular person tracing the hacker’s onchain bid stumbled on that the hacker had bridged the stolen property help to ETH.

IBC-enabled chains deployed a patch for the vulnerability when it used to be flagged earlier this year. Even when Terra used to be a form of chains, Sommelier Protocol’s Zaki Manian told The Block that Terra developers neglected including the patch in a extra contemporary June upgrade.

“All of the Axelar USDC bridged to Terra used to be stolen the utilization of the IBC hooks exploit. A blinding quantity of ASTRO used to be additionally stolen,” he mentioned.

The Terra blockchain resumed producing blocks at round almost today after center of the night ET after deploying an emergency fix.