Layer-1 blockchain network Initia has experienced its second security breach in under three weeks, resulting in the theft of approximately $3.27 million in digital assets.
According to an official confirmation provided by the platform on Wednesday, an unauthorized actor compromised Initia's cloud infrastructure earlier in the week, forcing developers to temporarily suspend operations on the layer-1 network while remediation efforts are underway.
The initial breach took place on Monday when an attacker launched a command injection exploit using a compromised Google Cloud Platform key.
This unauthorized access exposed critical environment variables, allowing the intruder to infiltrate Initia's GitHub repositories and secondary cloud management accounts to harvest elevated credentials.
With these permissions, the attacker accessed Anvil—a platform designed for hosting rollups—and approved fraudulent Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) withdrawal transactions across five distinct rollups.
Consequently, the escrow contracts maintaining the collateralized assets were drained.
Following the unauthorized withdrawals, the perpetrator swapped the acquired assets on Initia's decentralized exchange.
The attacker successfully siphoned off 13,400 TIA, 8,000 USDC.inj, and 597,000 Noble USDC.
However, Initia clarified that no native INIT tokens were taken during the event.
Out of the total $3.27 million in compromised funds, roughly $2.16 million remains frozen directly on the halted network.
Initia halted its layer-1 operations on Tuesday and stated that it plans to restore full backing to the affected assets while actively collaborating with law enforcement agencies and cybersecurity partners.
This security incident follows a prior exploit on October 23, in which an attacker drained around $2.7 million by taking advantage of a vulnerability inside Initia's MoveVM script cache.
That flaw allowed unauthorized code to skip standard security validation checks and create unbacked balances that were subsequently bridged off the platform.
Readers tracking developments across the broader crypto market network will note that Initia's total exploit losses have reached nearly $6 million over the past month as investigations continue.
