Incident Overview
On June 2, 2025, the Nervos Network's ForceBridge was exploited, leading to the theft of approximately $3.7 million in assets—$3.1M on Ethereum and $0.6M on BNB Chain. A malicious actor gained control over the bridge and drained funds including USDT, USDC, ETH, DAI, and WBTC, all of which were subsequently swapped to ETH and funneled through Tornado Cash. In response, the Nervos team paused all bridge contracts and is actively investigating the incident with the help of law enforcement and partner exchanges.
The attacker appears to have compromised the ForceBridge contract, gaining unauthorized control and initiating a series of suspicious withdrawals. The stolen funds included:
257,800 USDT
539.09 ETH
898,300 USDC
60,400 DAI
0.79 WBTC
All assets were swapped to ETH using decentralized exchanges and then laundered through Tornado Cash to obscure their trail. The exploit occurred across multiple chains, primarily Ethereum and BNB Chain. Following detection by Cyvers and other monitoring tools, Nervos paused ForceBridge and acknowledged “abnormal activity,” initiating an internal and external investigation. The protocol’s security flaws—likely in access control or message verification within the bridge—remain under review.
Incident Report
Protocol Information
What the Attacker Needed to Succeed
Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.
What Auditors Should Check
If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Nervos Network, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (June 2025).
- Verify all logic paths related to Access Control are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Access Control Attacks attack class for patterns
- Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs
Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.
Free TrialRelated Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
Learn to Prevent the Next Nervos Network
The Nervos Network hack is one of many attacks that skilled auditors are trained to detect before deployment. Master real exploit patterns and defense techniques with hands-on Web3 security training.