Coreum Cross-Chain Bridge Hacked, Nearly 200,000 XRP Stolen

August 12th - The cross-chain bridge connecting the XRP Ledger to Coreum was attacked on August 9th. The attacker exploited a vulnerability to steal approximately 199,916 XRP, causing the bridge's asset balance to plummet from around 200,410 XRP to only 493.5 XRP.

Analysis indicates that this attack was not against the XRP Ledger itself nor involved any private key disclosure. Instead, it leveraged a flaw in Coreum's cross-chain bridge validation logic. The attacker initiated a fake deposit operation, tricking the bridge system into recognizing it as a genuine deposit and triggering the other end of the bridge to send real XRP to the attacker.

On-chain data shows that within 97 minutes, the attacker executed 94 multi-signature authorization transactions to complete the fund transfer. These transactions required 17 signatures out of 28 relay node keys, indicating the attacker successfully bypassed the bridge system's verification mechanism.

As of August 11th, the Coreum cross-chain bridge remains in a suspended state, and the Coreum Development Foundation has yet to release an official incident report. This event impacted a third-party cross-chain infrastructure and did not exploit any vulnerability in the XRP Ledger protocol layer. The XRP mainnet and user private keys remain unaffected.