What happened
On July 31, 2024, an attacker exploited an IBC hooks vulnerability on the post-2022 Terra chain. Contemporary reporting estimates token theft above 4 million dollars, including about 60 million ASTRO, 3.5 million USDC, 500,000 USDT, and 2.7 BTC; this does not reconcile with the imported 6.5 million-dollar figure.
How it happened
- The attacker exploited IBC hooks, a third-party module that lets ICS-20 token transfers initiate contract calls.
- Reporting says the flaw allowed token minting to the attacker wallet and theft of bridged assets.
- Terra halted block production for about four hours while validators deployed an emergency patch.
- The chain resumed after the emergency fix.
Protocol details
Classification
Other / Infrastructure / Reentrancy
Protocol Type
Exploit/Other
Implementation language
Golang
Protocol links
Website
@terra_money
Evidence
- report Report theblock.co
- report Report binance.com
- report Report coingape.com
- report Report cryptonews.com
- report Post-mortem medium.com
- analysis DeFiLlama defillama.com
- analysis Terra Blockchain Briefly Halted After Exploiter Steals Tokens Using IBC Hooks Vulnerability unchainedcrypto.com
Understand the attack patterns
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