The Aptos blockchain was reported to have had a critical vulnerability, with an attack cost of only a few hundred dollars, and the team has promptly fixed it

According to Coindesk, security company Hexens' white hat hackers discovered a vulnerability in the Aptos blockchain, which has been fixed. If exploited maliciously, this vulnerability could expose up to $70 billion in digital assets to systemic risk, including stablecoins and cross-chain bridges.

In late February, Hexens researchers reported a serious vulnerability in the Move virtual machine (the execution environment for processing on-chain smart contracts) to the Aptos development team. They pointed out that this was an "expired cache vulnerability," which could lead to a type confusion vulnerability, meaning the software could be tricked into misidentifying one on-chain resource as another. The researchers simulated the attack in a real network environment with a success rate of over 90%. They used a well-configured server setup (costing only $3,000) to simulate about one-third of the validator network, and the attack did not require internal access or special permissions. The Aptos team immediately fixed the vulnerability after it was discovered, resulting in no financial losses.