Unleash Protocol exploited for $3.9 million
Unleash Protocol, a project promising to allow creators to register their intellectual property on the blockchain, has been exploited for around $3.9 million. An attacker was able to gain administrative access, despite the project's governance system ostensibly being protected by a multisignature wallet. They then deployed a new smart contract, which allowed them to siphon assets from the project. The attacker then bridged the funds to ETH and laundered them via the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer.
Flow blockchain exploited for $3.9 million
The Flow blockchain suffered an exploit in which an attacker was able to mint a large number of wrapped FLOW tokens, which they then swapped to tokens on other blockchains. Ultimately around $3.9 million was stolen, and the FLOW token dramatically plunged in price.
Some crypto exchanges, such as Upbit and Bithumb, halted withdrawals and deposits for FLOW after the exploit was discovered. Flow later confirmed the exploit, and said that validators "executed a coordinated halt" of the network to shut down the attack.
Binance's Trust Wallet extension hacked; users lose $7 million
The Trust Wallet Chrome extension was compromised in an apparent supply chain attack. People who used the non-custodial wallet extension after it updated to version 2.68 lost funds after malicious code was introduced to exfiltrate wallet seed phrases so that the attackers could then drain the wallets. Victims have lost a combined $7 million due to the compromise.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao — who supposedly has no managerial role at Binance after he and the company were criminally charged in the US — announced that Binance would reimburse users who lost funds.
Crypto trader loses $50 million to address poisoning attack
A crypto trader lost almost $50 million in the Tether stablecoin after falling victim to an address poisoning attack. Because blockchain wallet addresses are long, random alphanumeric strings, traders often use the first and/or last several characters to quickly recognize wallets, and copy and paste regularly used wallet addresses from their transaction history. This has given rise to a type of scam known as "address poisoning", where scammers generate wallet addresses that share similar beginning and end characters, and use them to send transactions to wealthy victims. If they're lucky, as they were in this case, the victim will accidentally copy the similar looking scammer's wallet address when making a transfer of significant size.
After the theft, the victim sent an on-chain message to the scammer, offering a $1 million "bounty" for the return of the remaining funds. They threatened, "We have officially filed a criminal case. With the assistance of law enforcement, cybersecurity agencies, and multiple blockchain protocols, we have already gathered substantial and actionable intelligence regarding your activities." However, there's been no activity from the wallet since the message, and the thief had long since begun laundering the funds via Tornado Cash.
- Thief wallet, Etherscan [archive]
- On-chain message, Etherscan
Yearn Finance suffers fourth exploit only weeks after third
Only weeks after losing $6.6 million to an infinite mint exploit, a Yearn Finance smart contract has again been exploited, allowing an attacker to make off with around 103 ETH (~$300,000). The affected contract is a legacy contract that was part of the Yearn v1 project (once known as iearn). The attacker used a flash loan to manipulate the price of tokens in the vault, allowing them to withdraw the iearn assets, which they then swapped for ETH.
This is Yearn's fourth hack, following the $6.6 million theft in November, an $11 million exploit in 2023, and an $11 million exploit in 2021. Yearn also lost around $1.4 million in 2023 in connection to the Euler Finance attack.
Ribbon Finance suffers $2.7 million exploit, plans to use "dormant" users' funds to repay active users
Ribbon Finance, which has partially rebranded to Aevo, has lost $2.7 million after attackers exploited a vulnerability in the smart contract for legacy Ribbon vaults that enabled them to manipulate oracle prices and withdraw a large amount of ETH and USDC.
Ribbon has announced it will cover $400,000 of the lost funds with its own assets. However, Ribbon is also offering users a lower-than-expected haircut on their assets by assuming that some of the largest affected accounts will not withdraw their assets, having been dormant for several years. While this plan may benefit active users, it seems like it could get very messy if those dormant users do wish to withdraw their assets and discover they've been used to pay others.
Binance employee suspended after launching a token and promoting it with company accounts
Binance has announced that the company has suspended an employee who used the platform's official Twitter accounts to promote a memecoin they had launched. The token, called "year of the yellow fruit", pumped in price after official Binance accounts coaxed followers to "harvest abundantly".
Binance publicly acknowledged that an employee had been suspended for misconduct over the incident. "These actions constitute abuse of their position for personal gain and violate our policies and code of professional conduct," Binance tweeted from its BinanceFutures account. After this announcement, the memecoin token price spiked even further.
Earlier this year, Binance fired another employee after discovering they had used inside information to profit from a token sale event.
Prysm consensus client bug causes Ethereum validators to lose over $1 million
Ethereum validators running the Prysm consensus client lost around 382 ETH ($1.18 million) after a bug resulted in delays that caused validators to miss blocks and attestations. Though the bug had been introduced around a month prior, it did not affect validators until Ethereum completed its "Fusaka" network update on December 3. Around 19% of Ethereum validators use the Prysm consensus client, which is developed by Offchain Labs.
- "Fusaka Mainnet Prysm Incident", Prysm
- Client Distribution, Clientdiversity.org