December DeFi Hacks: A month full of lessons for everyone
The month of December has been quite bearish for Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies. On top of this bearishness, hackers have continued to target a number of blockchain-based platforms, draining huge amounts of money. In this article, we will discover these hacks and how the platforms have helped their users.
December DeFi Hacks
There are a number of DeFi exploits that shook investors and developers alike. As the year ends, the last month of the year has definitely provided some valuable lessons on security for the entire crypto industry.Grim Finance
Grim Finance is a Smart Yield Optimizer Platform on the Fantom Opera network. The platform announced that it had suffered a hack that resulted in a loss of over 30 million dollars. The announcement was made on December 19 and was implemented via an advanced strategy against which the platform wasn't well defended.As per a previous report, the attack was implemented via a function which is titled beforeDeposit(). Through this function, the hackers targeted the "vault strategy entering a malicious token contract."
Furthermore, the platform asked the investors to withdraw their money immediately from the platform as the situation was out of control. Since the vault contract was at risk, every penny deposited in the platform was at risk.
On the other hand, the platform contacted "Circle (USDC), DAI, and AnySwap regarding the attacker address to potentially freeze any further fund transfers." Many projects lent a helping hand to the project, including Beefy, Tomb, SpiritSwap, and FTM Alerts.
Moreover, Solidity Finance, who had audited Grim Finance a few months ago, said that they had hired a new member to their team who missed out on important details and resulting in the hack.
Bent Finance
Bent Finance, a staking and farming platform, announced that it had suffered a hack on December 21. According to our previous coverage, the platform suspended reward claims and said that there was no loss in funds. Furthermore, Bent Finance also said that there was no loss of funds.Investors said that the platform implemented a rug pull as Peckshield revealed that the hack transaction happened on the Bent deployer address. On the other hand, the platform said that they are looking into the same with the help of two white hat developers.
As per crypto fraud investigator Joe McGill, the hack resulted in a loss of 440 ETH (nearly 1.6 million USD). On the other hand, Bent Finance said that they will regain the funds "one way or the other."
BadgerDAO
BadgerDAO suffered a hack nearly worth $120 million and announced the same on December 2. As per our previous report, the hack was implemented by taking advantage of a vulnerability on the user interface of the platform.The platform paused all smart contracts to prevent withdrawals in case the hacker tried to do so. Another major development in this hack was the loss of nearly $51 million for Celsius, a crypto lender. In an AMA or Ask-Me-Anything, the CEO of the firm revealed that they had lost money in the BadgerDAO hack. He did not reveal the amount, and the $51 million is speculation.
BitMart
BitMart, a cryptocurrency exchange, has suffered a hack that has troubled a number of investors in the platform. According to our previous reports, nearly $200 million were drained in the hack via Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain hot wallet exploits. Sheldon Xia, the CEO of the BitMart crypto exchange, revealed the turn of events in his tweet.Except for a small portion of the ETH and BSC hot wallets, all other wallets were unscathed, but the platform canceled withdrawal until the matter was resolved. Furthermore, a Twitter user pointed out that the crypto exchange claims to hold nearly 0.5% of all the assets in hot wallets, the rest being stored in cold wallets. However, this doesn't seem to be the case.
Shiba Inu team and Huobi exchange will help the BitMart exchange to get over this loss.
MonoX (MONO)
As per Rekt News, the multi-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) MonoX (MONO) was hacked, and nearly $31 million were drained from the platform. The hack was confirmed by the official Twitter handle on November 30 and headlined many websites on December 1.The hack was implemented with another unexpected strategy where the hackers exploited a method in the swap contract and caused the prices of MONO tokens to rise by huge amounts. As a result, the attacker used the MONO token to purchase other assets in the pool.
The platform witnessed two attacks in quick succession and drained 19.4 million USD on Polygon and then 12 million USD on Ethereum, just 17 minutes later.
AscendEX
AscendEX, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, was also hacked. The hack was confirmed by the official Twitter handle on December 12, and the platform claimed to completely cover any and all the loss that the users have suffered as a result of the hack.As per our previous reports, nearly $77.7 million were lost as the attacker was smart enough to transfer a number of ERC-20, BSC, and Polygon tokens from the exchange's hot wallets. The exchange said that the affected users would be 100% provided with their money, and the platform is also developing a new infrastructure for the users.
Monkey Kingdom
Monkey Kingdom is a Solana nonfungible token (NFT) project. On December 21, the platform revealed that they had suffered a huge hack. The NFT project was backed by popular DJ and music producer Steve Aoki.According to the official report, the Discord servers of the NFT were hacked and flooded with thousands of bots who DM-ed the members of the channels, trying to phish them. The hack was initiated with the breach of Grape, a well-known solution for the easy verification of users on the SOL project.
The hackers made off with as much as $1.3 million. The scammer phished the users to a website where they thought they'd receive the Monkey Kingdom NFT by connecting their wallets but were later drained of their SOL tokens.
Vulcan Forged
Vulcan Forged, a play-to-earn NFT platform, which offers 6 games, was also recently hacked, leading to a loss of nearly $140 million. However, the platform took to Twitter to announce that all the lost funds were reimbursed.The refunds were implemented via Vulcan Forged's treasury, where the project saved money for times like these. The hackers made away with nearly 9% of the entire supply of the platform, i.e., 4.5 million PYR tokens.
Pizza DeFi
As per a December 9 tweet from Pizza, an EOS-based programmable financial gateway, the platform was hacked, resulting in the loss of around $5 million. The hacker's username was "itsspiderman."The hacker minted infinite Tripool tokens and deposited them as collateral in the platform. Pizza said that the recovery of the funds is "unprecedently tough" and is talking long.
Is this the future?
The blockchain industry is still unregulated and decentralized in nature. This has its own benefits and cons as well. The number of hacks in December is a representation of the cons.As per an August 24 report, nearly 76% of all hacks are related to the DeFi industry. It seems that the numbers are increasing as of December. A major reason for this is the presence of privacy which enables users to implement malicious strategies.
Although the platforms are doing everything they can, a need for strict laws cannot be ignored.
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