Introduction
Qubit is a decentralized finance platform. It involves trading cryptocurrency coins to individuals by offering a platform to transact. This is done via the company’s Qbridge protocol, which has proven to be secure and flawless in service delivery for some time now. However, on the evening of twenty-seventh January 2022, it announced a breach of security in its systems. A hacker exploited a vulnerability in its systems and over two hundred and six coins from its Qridge protocol. This led to great losses leading to extraordinary measures being initiated to rescue the situation.
Body
Blockchain and cryptocurrency is a field that needs heightened security due to the enormous investment involved. Breaches and lapses exist here and there but, Qubit being hacked and having Binance coins to the tune of hundreds being stolen was outrageous. This is almost the equivalent of eighty million US dollars. PeckShield, which is a blockchain security firm confirmed the hack. CertiK, a security firm, explains that a logical error was exploited, allowing the hackers to input malicious data enabling them to withdraw tokens of Binance Smart Chain when none were deposited in Ethereum.
Qubit said that it was trying to assess the affected assets and, at the same time, track the exploiters. They could not establish their attacker, although they managed to send a message to them offering a reward if they could safely return the stolen funds. Qubit Has a bug bounty program that they pointed out to settle the reward if the hackers accepted. The program offers two hundred and fifty thousand US dollars to discoverers of the most critical vulnerabilities. In their announcement, Qubit urged the hackers to negotiate with them if the amount offered didn’t satisfy them. However, Qubit seems to have realized that the offer was very little and increased it to one million US dollars and later to two million US dollars with a promise that they would not be faced with prosecution once they settled this matter.
Honestly, suppose I was criminally minded and had managed to swindle company money to the tune of eighty million US dollars. In that case, I could hold on until their offer was as close to eighty million US dollars as possible. The news about the hack is very disturbing to Qubit and its users. This is another instance where a cryptocurrency firm has had its security systems tested by external individuals and successfully has been breached. This is a very worrying state, especially when a company is left begging hackers to return the money stolen for failure to return will easily bring the company to a collapse completely. Promising to pay hackers a reward to have the money returned could easily be challenged legally in some parts of the world. But, what can one do when such catastrophic developments occur?
Conclusion
In conclusion, the strength of a cryptocurrency DeFi platform is how watertight its security systems are. A company, no matter how big it is, without a strong security system to guard it can be equated to a big treasure house with a weak or no fence. Thieves can easily break in and run away with whatever is inside. Same way, hackers can get into the systems of a Crypto company and steal an enormous amount of money like the case with Qubit.
Reference
Zhao, Y., & Duncan, B. (2018, July). The impact of crypto-currency risks on the use of blockchain for cloud security and privacy. In 2018 International Conference on High-Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS) (pp. 677-684). IEEE.
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