The Aptos blockchain was revealed to have had a critical vulnerability. The attack cost was only a few hundred dollars, and the team fixed it in a timely manner

On Twitter, according to Coindesk, a white hat hacker from security firm Hexens discovered a vulnerability in the Aptos blockchain, which has been fixed. If exploited maliciously, the vulnerability could expose up to $70 billion of digital assets to systemic risk, including stablecoins and cross-chain bridges.

In late February, Hexens researchers reported a serious vulnerability in the Move virtual machine (an execution environment for processing on-chain smart contracts) to the Aptos development team. It indicates that this is an “expired cache bug,” leading to a type confusion vulnerability, where software may be tricked into mistaking one type of on-chain resource for another. The researchers simulated the attack in a real network environment, with a success rate of over 90%. Using a fully configured set of servers (only $3,000), they simulated about one-third of the validator network, and the attack required no insider access or special privileges. The Aptos team fixed the vulnerability as soon as it was discovered without any financial loss.