The security breach occurred on October 1 when a bug in the interaction between the NEAR Intents smart contract and Omni's deposit and withdrawal infrastructure allowed attackers to drain assets from a BSC hot wallet. PeckShield and analyst ZachXBT linked the incident to North Korea's Lazarus Group, noting that the stolen funds were routed through KuCoin and bridged to Bitcoin. The price of the $NEAR token fell about 10% in the 24 hours following the news of the exploit.
NEAR Intents has since patched the vulnerability and pledged to reimburse all affected users in full. While near.com and lauch operations have resumed, deposits and withdrawals across 11 networks, including Polygon and Avalanche, were paused for roughly 12 hours for infrastructure fixes. The company stated that the core NEAR Protocol and native tokens were not affected by the incident.