Last week, Cybercriminals stole approximately $80 million in cryptocurrency from Qubit, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform. Over the weekend, a large number of Qubit users expressed situations of devastating financial loss on social media platforms. Qubit announced it had obtained funding to offer a $2 million bounty for the return of the $80 million in cryptocurrencies.
The theft was accomplished due to a bug in the bridge software Qubit deployed to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. Criminals were able to isolate a faulty deposit function, which according to Qubit should have been deleted after initial testing. The function allowed a user to purchase credit on the Qubit platform without checking whether more than $0 of cryptocurrency collateral was deposited. As a result, the cyber criminals were able to purchase a near infinite amount of credit and then cash out all of the collateral cryptocurrency on the platform.
Qubit has said it is working with all other major cryptocurrency exchanges in order to freeze or prevent transactions from the cryptocurrency wallet in which the $80 million was deposited, and that for now all funds seem to be in this wallet. So far, they have been unable to freeze the wallet, however.