BNB Chain to Perform a Hardfork on Wednesday to Fix the $100M Exploit

BNB Chain has announced a hard fork upgrade to fix the loopholes that drained an estimated $100 million on October 6, 2022.

BNB Chain previously known as Binance Smartchain announced an occurrence of a significant radical change (Moran Hadfork) to its network protocol to fix a major bug that cost the ecosystem $100 million on October 6, 2022.

The upgrade will be a short-term patch to mitigate the cross-chain bridge infrastructure between Beacon Chain and Smart Chain. The hard fork’s primary purpose will be to reinstate the cross-chain, thus preventing other similar malicious attacks from happening before the problem is permanently solved. The BNB change will be a testnet as well as a mainnet hard fork release.

The Moran hard fork upgrade is estimated to occur on the Mainnet. It will be scheduled to appear at block height 22,107,423. The current block-generating speed predicts that the Mainnet upgrade will happen around October 12, 2022, at 8:00 a.m. (GMT).

The Testnet hard fork upgrade is scheduled to take place at block height 23,603,940. The current block generation speed predicts that this will occur on October 11, 2022, at 8:00 a.m. (UTC).

Binance has also said that it will suspend both deposit and withdrawal transactions on the BNB Chain network one hour before the hard fork begins and will be resumed once the upgraded network is deemed stable and safe for Binancians.

The testnet and mainnet changes brought about by the hard fork upgrade will include a fix for the vulnerable hash check. BNB will eventually move the check to the ICS23 spec. Another enhancement will include a block header in the CrossChain contract’s sequence check. Following the upgrade, the relayer will be whitelisted among the genesis candidates.

Nothing is required of regular users. However, on the other hand, Node operators will need to take a few steps to incorporate the hard fork changes. They’d have to start by downloading the binary from the GitHub entry.

After that, if their node is still running, they must stop it and replace the old binary with the new one. They will then need to restart their node once this is completed. That’sThat’s all there is to it. A straightforward process indeed.
The attack happened at the beginning of October when the attackers initially wanted to create 2 million BNB tokens on the BEP2 to BEP 20 Bridge from thin air. The malicious cybercriminals intended to make these tokens and send them to their wallets in two installments of a million BNB coins each.

According to reports, the attack began at 6:30 a.m. UTC. Fortunately, to BNB’s relief, the attacker was too slow to move the BNB tokens off-chain. As a result, BNB detected the unprecedented attack and ceased all operations, allowing the Chain to recover up to $7 million.

The upcoming BNB hard fork upgrade should bring the entire quagmire under control as well as serve as a temporary solution as BNB works on new tactics to prevent such attacks from happening in the future.