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Open Zeppelin Reveals Top 10 Blockchain Hacking Techniques in 2022

In an effort to make the crypto world more secure, OpenZeppelin, a crypto cybersecurity business that provides an open-source platform for developing secure smart contracts, presented the final results of the top 10 blockchain hacking tactics of 2022 on Thursday U.S. time.

A problem on the software node level of layer 2 scaling solution Optimism and a vulnerability on the key generation level of vanity address generator Profanity tied for first and second place. The Optimism flaw, if exploited, results in “an endless mint” of Optimism’s native token OP, which “would collapse many (if not all) optimism protocols,” while the Profanity vulnerability puts at least $160 million at danger, according to Ashiq Amien, one of the project’s six judges.

Before the project began in 2022, all of the hacking tactics were publicly publicized. Following Monday’s $200 million breach of the decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol Euler Finance, the release of the top ten hacking techniques is intended to highlight best practices for security measures on various levels of blockchain code, including the smart contract, key generation, and node levels.

“By essentially aggregating all the data and ideally uncovering underestimated research,” said Nikita Stupin, a blockchain security engineer and researcher at Open Zeppelin.

“This is mostly for security researchers so that they are up to speed with the most creative approaches, strategies, or attack vectors so that they can use them and observe them in their audits,” Stupin explained in an interview with CoinDesk.

According to the announcement, other members of the top 10 list include a bug that allowed exploiters to empty all wrapped token contracts, potentially rendering the wETH contract insolvent, and a vulnerability on the Avalanche blockchain that was used to break security assumptions of several protocols, including decentralized exchange SushiSwap and lending platform Abracadabra.

The top 15 hacking tactics used in 2022 were chosen by the community, while the top ten were assessed by a group of six blockchain security professionals, including Paradigm’s chief of security Samczsun.

 

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