Hacker Receives $6 Million from Aurora Labs for Saving 70,000 ETH from Getting Stolen

Aurora Labs, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environment built on the NEAR protocol, has recently paid a $6 million bounty reward to a hacker known as pwning.eth, who exposed a critical vulnerability that could have resulted in the loss of 70,000 ETH.

As first shared by The Block, pwning.eth reported the bug in April via the bug bounty platform Immunefi, and it was swiftly fixed before any hacker could seize the opportunity to steal funds.

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According to the bug bounty platform, this was a critical inflation bug on Aurora Engine, where users can deposit ETH and ERC-20 tokens from the Ethereum mainnet to the NEAR protocol.

The Bug Could Have Made Aurora Lose Over 70,000 ETH

The vulnerability, if not discovered and fixed in time, could have enabled any hacker to mint Ethereum (ETH) and drain over 70,000 ETH worth around $122 million at current prices and $210 at the time the vulnerability was reported.

Reacting to the development, the Head of security at Aurora Labs, Frank Braun, said:

“Our bug bounty program with Immunefi proved very valuable in incentivizing white hats to look at our code base and disclose bugs in a responsible manner.

“Such a vulnerability should have been discovered at an earlier stage of the defence pipeline and we have already started improving our methods to achieve that in the future. However this event ultimately proves that our security mechanisms work.”

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It should be noted that the bug bounty program from Aurora is still active on Immunefi, including many other related programs.

As reported by The Block, a total of $40 million has been awarded to support ethical hackers and researchers so far.

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