Qubit Finance loses $80 million after being hacked

High-profile hacks have become more common across the cryptocurrency market, and Qubit Finance is one of the most recent decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols to be exploited by hackers.

Hackers have stolen more than $80 million from Binance Smart Chain-based Qubit Finance, a tweet confirmed on Friday. The address associated with the attack stole 206,809 BNB from Qubit's QBridge protocol. At press time, the assets are worth more than $80 million.

$80M just stolen from @QubitFin? Check out this address: https://t.co/1Oao54Ndnb

- claudeshannon.eth ⛽️ (@0xclaudeshannon) January 27, 2022

According to Pai Dun, who analyzed Qubit’s smart contracts, QBridge was hacked, creating “a large amount of xETH collateral” that was then used to drain the entire amount of BNB stored on QBridge.

In a report by security firm CertiK, attackers exploited the deposit option in the QBridge contract to illegally mint 77,162 qXETH, an ether-bridged asset via Qubit. The protocol is tricked into thinking the attacker has deposited money when they haven't.

According to CertiK, the hackers performed such actions several times, eventually converting all assets into BNB. This makes the breach the seventh-largest in DeFi, according to DeFiYield Rekt.

The Qubit team released a statement informing customers that they are still monitoring the hacker and their affected assets. The blog also notes that we have contacted the attackers to offer the highest reward determined by their plans. The team has since disabled supply, redeem, borrow, repay, bridge and bridge redeem functions until further notice. However, they said they could file a claim.

Hacks, rug-pulls, and protocol bugs are all common in the cryptocurrency space. Earlier this month, decentralized financial security platform and bug bounty service Immunefi revealed that cybercrime losses in 2021 will exceed $10.2 billion. On Jan. 17, popular cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com suffered a loss of nearly $34 million following a security breach.

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