The BNB Smart Chain has scheduled a network upgrade and a hard fork for Oct. 12 where a temporary urgent patch release will be deployed to fix the network’s vulnerability.
According to a GitHub post on Tuesday, the patch release will mitigate the cross-chain infrastructure between the Beacon Chain and Smart Chain so that cross-chain functionality could be re-enabled. For context, the cross-chain bridge was the target of an exploit last week that saw an attacker drain 2 million BNB tokens from the chain. Following the exploit, cross-chain functionality was temporarily suspended at the time.
The hard fork, named Moran, is expected to take place on the mainnet on Oct. 12 at 8:00 UTC at a block height of 22,107,423.
Binance said it will suspend all deposits and withdrawals on the BNB Smart Chain an hour before the hard fork goes live.
“We will reopen deposits and withdrawals for the BNB Smart Chain (BEP20) network once we deem the upgraded network to be stable, and we will not notify users in a further announcement,” said Binance.
Last Thursday, the BNB Smart was exploited for $100 million – a figure that could have been significantly higher if BNB’s validators hadn’t acted quickly to lock down the chain. The attacker was close to making off with $570 million worth of crypto assets after exploiting a bug in the Binance Smart Chain token bridge.
In a series of tweets on Thursday, Paradigm researcher samczsun outlined how the bug in the way Binance Bridge verified proofs let bad actors forge arbitrary messages.
“Fortunately, the attacker here only forged two messages, but the damage could have been far worse,” said samczsun in a tweet.
