Wormhole’s 2022 hacker was briefly eligible for its airdrop

The hacker behind the huge $320 million hack on wormhole bridge in 2022 was briefly added to a list of eligible users for its W token airdrop. In an April 4 post by pseudonymous researcher Pland on X (formerly known as Twitter), the team had forgotten to remove wallets tied to some wallet addresses connected to the hack.

Wormhole’s 2022 hacker was eligible for its airdrop

Wormhole suffered a huge $320 million hack in 2022 after the hacker breached the cross-chain bridge. Data from Degen News from X showed that using the Solana checker link Airdrop.link also indicated that at the time the four wallets connected to the hack were eligible for the airdrop. Should the hackers decide to cash in on their eligible claims, they would have been able to claim $50,000 worth of the recently launched W token.

However, a brief check of the wallet addresses on the website, showed that the wallet addresses were no longer eligible for the airdrop, showing that the Wormhole team had removed them from the list. The four wallets involved have also been tagged by Solana Block Explorer for their connections to the 2022 wormhole breach.

W token airdrop and security concerns

The Wormhole breach became the talk of the crypto community due to the heavy funds that the hackers stole from the bridge. The hackers stole about $320 million from the platform, setting it in the history books as one of the biggest breaches in the crypto sector. However, a counter exploit was carried out by the decentralized finance platform Oasis.app and infrastructure firm Jump Crypto on the hacker.

The joint attack enjoyed relative success as Oasis.app and Jump Crypto were able to recover about $225 million in several digital assets from the hacker. On April 2, Wormhole announced that it would airdrop tokens to eligible users on April 3 in what it tagged ‘Wormhole Wednesday’. The platform announced that it was going to distribute over 617 million tokens among its users across several chains.

However, there have been several worries about the impact and implications of the Wormhole airdrop. In a recent post made by blockchain sleuth ZachXBT on X, scammers, and hackers have been targeting users since when the airdrop was announced. He noted that there are a lot of fake handles on X spotting gold checkmarks; the checkmarks are given to handles affiliated with firms in the comments. He clarified that most of these handles belong to scammers who are looking for users to scam via phishing links.