Attacker Steals $50 Million in NES, Only Profits $60,000

The attacker exploited a vulnerability in the Cosmos EVM shared module to steal $50 million worth of NES tokens, but ultimately only made a profit of about $60,000. Cosmos Labs had previously reported a security flaw in its shared Cosmos EVM software, affecting multiple chains built on that module, including Nesa. The main attacker, with an address starting with 0x9AE7, had previously spent $250,000 to purchase NES and cross-chain it to Nesa Chain. They then exploited the vulnerability to inflate their account balance by 200 times, transferring $50 million in NES back to Ethereum, with the initial funds coming from Monero. The attacker dispersed the tokens across multiple wallet addresses, exchanged NES for ETH on a DEX, and then deposited the proceeds into a centralized exchange. Due to the rapid withdrawal of funds from the liquidity pool, most of the attacker's exchange transactions faced severe slippage, resulting in an actual expenditure of $255,000 to initiate the attack, while only cashing out $315,000, yielding a net profit of about $60,000. Bubblemaps noted that although another Cosmos EVM chain had suffered a similar attack of $1.4 million the day before, the differences in funding sources and operational methods suggest that the two incidents may have originated from different attackers. The report mentioned that the price of NES tokens plummeted by 90% at one point but has since rebounded significantly, with the team believing that the recovery is mainly due to arbitrage activities resulting from price mismatches between DEX and CEX after the attack.

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