Axelar Network Suffers Exploit, $4.67M in Tokens Stolen via Secret Bridge

According to Axelar Network, approximately $4.67 million worth of tokens were stolen due to a vulnerability in the ICS-20 smart contract that facilitates asset bridging from Axelar to Secret Network through Cosmos IBC. The attacker exploited an unlimited minting flaw to create arbitrary wrapped Axelar assets on Secret. Upon discovery, Axelar's emergency committee immediately disabled the Secret and Secret-SNIP connections.

The incident was isolated to assets bridged through IBC to Secret Network. Other IBC connections, Secret tokens, and Axelar's core protocol remained unaffected, with no cross-chain contagion detected.