Initia Confirms Second Exploit in Three Weeks as $3.27M Is Stolen

Initia said Wednesday it suffered its second security exploit in less than three weeks, with an attacker stealing about $3.27 million in crypto assets after compromising the blockchain network’s cloud infrastructure. According to Cointelegraph, the attacker gained unauthorized access on Monday through a command injection attack involving a compromised Google Cloud Platform key. Initia said the breach exposed environment variables, which enabled access to its GitHub and cloud accounts and additional credentials. The attacker then accessed Anvil, a platform hosting rollups, and validated fraudulent Inter-Blockchain Communication withdrawals from five rollups, releasing assets held in the network’s escrow accounts. Initia said about $2.16 million of the stolen assets remain frozen on its halted network. The attacker sold assets on Initia’s decentralized exchange and withdrew 13,400 TIA, 8,000 USDC.inj and 597,000 Noble USDC; no INIT tokens were withdrawn. Initia halted its layer-1 on Tuesday and said it intends to restore the backing of affected assets. Recovery efforts are ongoing with its law enforcement and security partners. The incident follows an Oct. 23 exploit in which an attacker stole about $2.7 million by exploiting a vulnerability in Initia’s MoveVM script cache. The vulnerability allowed malicious code to bypass security checks and create unbacked token balances that were later bridged out of the network.