Yesterday, two hacks on decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols netted a complete of over $5 million, with an extra $5 million siphoned off from compromised wallets on Wednesday.
Whereas the founders of two OG protocols, Aave and Maker (now Sky), bro’d down over Starcraft whereas basking in a “DeFi renaissance moment,” a number of the sector’s much less well-established tasks had been happening in historical past for the improper causes.
Repeat DeFi hack or a brand new bug?
First up was Onyx Protocol whose $3.8 million loss was first considered a repeat of the well-known bug that drained $2.1 million from the mission towards the again finish of final 12 months.
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Onyx is a fork of Compound Finance, which incorporates an notorious vulnerability by which freshly-launched, empty lending markets are briefly left open to a value manipulation assault, if not dealt with appropriately.
Given the recognition of Compound’s v2 codebase with fast-forking DeFi devs, the bug is exploited with alarming regularity throughout the sector, and was initially recognized as having been the reason for Onyx’s newest loss.
Nevertheless, because the workforce identified in a ‘post-mortem’ thread on X (previously Twitter), this time the vulnerability additionally lay within the platform’s ‘NFT Liquidation contract.’ The attacker was capable of drain the vUSD stablecoin which was then offered off, inflicting it to depeg.
One thing’s not including up
Subsequent got here ‘bitcoin restaking’ protocol Bedrock which seemed to be overly bullish on ETH, costing it round $2 million.
Learn extra: ‘Cryptographic performance art’ drains contract one block after launch
The defective code allowed customers to mint Bedrock’s uniBTC token at a 1:1 ratio with staked ETH tokens, not making an allowance for the worth distinction between the 2 belongings (valued on the time at roughly $65,000 vs $2,650, respectively).
The uniBTC tokens had been then offered off for another wrapped bitcoin token, for a return of virtually 25x.
Crypto safety auditor Dedaub claims to have recognized the vulnerability prematurely, stating that such a easy bug might be found and exploited routinely by ‘fuzzing bots.’
Regardless of warning the Bedrock workforce two hours earlier than the assault, there was no response due time zone variations. Nevertheless, by elevating the problem individually with Pendle, a platform with $30 million of publicity to uniBTC, additional losses had been efficiently averted.
The Bedrock workforce responded to the incident, reassuring customers that each one uniBTC collateral stays intact. It estimated the losses at “approximately $2 million (mostly in DEX LPs),” including {that a} “comprehensive reimbursement plan is being finalized.”
Compromised keys?
On Wednesday, real-world-asset-focused Truflation warned of “some abnormal activity,” which it attributed to a malware assault.
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Blockchain investigator ZachXBT traced complete losses of over $5 million from addresses recognized because the mission’s “treasury multisig and personal wallets,” offering a listing of addresses by way of his Investigations Telegram channel.
Whereas the preliminary disclosure was scant on particulars, it does point out a reward to any whitehats capable of assist the investigation. This was adopted up with an on-chain message to the hacker, providing a 10% ‘bounty’ for the return of the funds.
Assuming funds aren’t returned earlier than 8am (UTC) on Saturday, the bounty might be opened as much as the general public in return for info resulting in a conviction.
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