Nexera hacked for $1.5M via smart contract exploit

The Nexera team recommends cryptocurrency investors stop trading the NXRA token as the token contract has suspended. Another smart contract security incident involved the theft of digital assets valued at $1.5 million through the Nexera protocol. Nexera which is a decentralized finance (DeFi) system, that aims to connect DeFi with traditional money, has breached for $1.5 million in NXRA tokens, as per Cyvers’ X post.

“Our system has detected a suspicious transaction involving your proxy contract. An address took ownership of your proxy contract and upgraded it. Shortly after, the address used the withdraw admin function to transfer all the $NXRA tokens.”

Although the incident involving $1.5 million may seem small, it occurred just one day after a suspected white hat hacker used Ronin Network to obtain $9.8 million worth of Ether tokens. The hacker promptly refunded all the funds that lost.

The reality that the hacker has already left with the stolen money demonstrates the incident’s malevolent purpose. According to Cyvers, the hacker has begun selling some of the NXRA tokens for ether. An estimated $1.5 million is lost as a result of the address selling all tokens for $ETH, with some monies already bridging to the $BNB chain.

Cybersecurity companies find it more challenging to track down the source of the funds when hackers change their stolen tokens into Ether to launder the money through cryptocurrency mixers like Tornado Cash.

Onchain data indicates that this is not the exploiter’s first malicious occurrence. In a Telegram post on-chain investigator ZachXBT mentioned that other private key breaches are also has linked to the addresses of the exploiter.

“Attacker is connected on-chain to recent private key compromise incidents such as SpaceCatch, Concentric Finance, OKX DEX, Serenity Shield, Reach, and many more.”

The exploit happened three weeks after the second-biggest cryptocurrency theft of 2024 which saw a hacker steal over $230 million from the Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX.