Cosmos Hub halts over 24 hours after Neutron governance attack

Cosmos Hub validators halted block production after a governance attack on Neutron. The attack initially caused losses of $9.5 million. The attacker extracted only around 20% of that amount. The remainder remained stuck on halted networks. Block production resumed at 12:00 UTC on Wednesday. Cosmos Hub halted at block height 33086740. The network was offline for over 24 hours. A malicious "AI Agent Takeover" governance proposal passed on Neutron. Neutron entered its "long-term maintenance phase" earlier this year. The proposal gave the attacker control of the Astroport and Drop applications. The attacker drained $4.9 million in assets from Astroport contracts. The attacker drained $4.4 million in assets from Drop contracts. The attacker reportedly spent $20,199 to acquire the NTRN tokens needed to pass the vote. Neutron was paused after the attack. The pause trapped an estimated $5 million in assets. Cosmos Hub validators also halted block production. The halt secured 1.2 million ATOM worth over $2.2 million in the attacker's address. The scheduled restart is set to include a queued refund of the trapped ATOM balance. The hacker's Ethereum address holds $1.8 million. A transaction worth over $300,000 remains pending on THORChain. That transaction is set to be refunded to the Cosmos Hub address upon restart. The incident was the third security scare in recent months for the wider Cosmos ecosystem. In late August, a bug in Cosmos Labs' Cosmos EVM module led to protocol-level exploits on four blockchains. KiiChain criticised the disclosure procedure. KiiChain called the loss of $9 million in KII tokens "avoidable." Earlier this month, Osmosis revealed that a June 25 exploit of Nomic's bridge created 40 nBTC worth $3.6 million at the time. The exploit left Osmosis' allBTC 36% unbacked.