For many burning the midnight oil and watching for up-to-date news on cryptocurrency, a real-time disaster could be seen unfolding over an hour-long period in which the Nomad Bridge was slowly drained of its contents thanks to a steady exploit that was found out and used until the assets were gone.

For those waking up the next day to see another pillar of the crypto ecosystem torn down by its users and over $190 million in losses, a rude awakening and a small hope of fund recovery are in store. While not the largest hack done in cryptocurrency history, according to initial reports on the matter, it appears to be one of the easiest to have been accomplished, according to those who saw it happen live.

This is believed to be because the hacker themself wasn't that knowledgeable or skilled and could have possibly stumbled upon the exploit without knowing how to truly capitalize on it immediately.

A perplexing aspect of this vulnerability was that all users had to do to hack bridge funds was copy the original hacker's transaction calldata, replace the original address with a personal one, and the tx would succeed!

Easy as CTRL-C, CTRL-V

Why was it possible?

— foobar (@0xfoobar) August 2, 2022

Woke up to another bridge hack. Good morning crypto twitter 🫡

This time, Nomad got rekt for around 190m. Some of it was whitehacked though.

The attacker could've have stolen everything in a single transaction but they didn't and got front run. pic.twitter.com/asirtpYpUc

— Mudit Gupta (@Mudit__Gupta) August 2, 2022

Another day, another hack this time it is Nomad Bridge. Nearly $200 million worth of cryptocurrency was lost in the attack.
Nomad is a cross-chain bridges, allows users to send and receive tokens between different blockchains.🧵

— Sooraj (@mallubeginner) August 2, 2022

apparently many people participated in nomad's hack because it was easy to do so

i can see future hackers leaking a vulnerability or even providing tooling to participate during a hack, trying to get lost in the crowd

— sake (@sakeblues) August 2, 2022

Shortly after the hack was finished, there were a lot of people posting graphs of different coins talking about what to do after the fact. Some claimed that white hat hackers, ones who supposedly hack for good, were cleaning out Nomad Bridge after the exploit was found that way the funds could be properly restored to people who put the funds in the bridge in the first place, though speculations suggest that's just Copium talking.

Many started to already increase the Copege by posting about their losses and how hacks like this are commonplace and shouldn't shatter the resiliency of cryptocurrency communities as news of the massive hack spread on platforms like Twitter overnight.

1/ Nomad was just hacked for $190M, making it the 5th largest DeFi hack of all time. How did this happen? We break down not just the exploit, but also HOW THE VULNERABILITY WAS INTRODUCED IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Understanding bugs isn't enough. We need to stop merging them.👇 pic.twitter.com/fVYIzKJPkY

— Zellic (@Zellic_io) August 2, 2022

Looks like @Oraclecharli3 is one of the victims of the Nomad Bridge hack.

Down 93% today on the ETH side.#cardano #ada $ada #hosky #cardanovasil pic.twitter.com/ALH1MhcQCS

— $HOSKY Token (@hoskytoken) August 1, 2022

So… Probably just lost 6 figures in the Nomad hack. Had adaUSDC sitting in my defi wallet. Since the bridge SC was hacked I cant exchange it back for USDC (eth). It stings but these are the growing pains of new tech and projects learning. Im more annoyed than angry…. pic.twitter.com/goAW9Nxz0g

— Arctic Alpha (@The_ArcticAlpha) August 2, 2022

Teams can come out of the other side of a hack. We did it at @paritytech – twice (!) in 2017 and while it was devastating at the time we built through it and came through the other side. I have faith that Nomad can do the same.

— asynchronous rob (@rphmeier) August 2, 2022