- A user of the Venus protocol lost $ 13 million for a phishing attack.
- The protocol was interrupted shortly after the attack.
- The losses of the hacks and exploits of crypto have crossed $ 2 billion this year.
The transport of $ 13.5 million in a pirate of a victim protocol in Venus has just smoked.
Venus is a Defi and Stablecoin loan protocol with around 2.7 billion dollars in investor deposits, according to Defilma data.
The stakeholders in the protocol joined Tuesday and voted to adopt an action plan to liquidate the attacker, just hours after the hacker siphoned $ 13.5 million in a Venus protocol user.
“The stolen funds will be recovered in a single transaction (and) this will not affect any other user position in Venus,” the team said in its action plan.
The striker initially extracted the funds via a phishing attack, a type of social engineering exploitation which encourages the victims to abandon access to their portfolios by signing a malicious transaction.
Drama is another example of DEFI communities trying to rewrite the rules of engagement concerning malicious exploits. In May, the Validators SU voted to cancel a hacking of 220 million dollars in Cetus, the largest decentralized blockchain exchange aggregator.
Tapioca Dao also used a countertoper to recover around $ 2.7 million from Ethereum from a pirate in October.
Phishing attack
In Tuesday’s incident, the attacker had access to the victim’s Venus protocol account and withdrew funds from his own portfolio.
The Venus team quickly interrupted the protocol, which prevented the attacker from being able to whiten the funds.
During an emergency vote, five portfolios approved a plan to liquidate the pirate portfolio, send the siphoneed funds to the victim and restart the protocol.
The motion was adopted unanimously among the participants in the vote, because the team cited the need to protect both the security of investor funds and the integrity of the protocol.
The vote adopted, the protocol will be partly reopened so that users can adjust their debt positions to avoid liquidations.
The protocol plans to restore full functionality to users after the liquidated attacker.
While the incident affected only one Venus protocol user, the protocol has already undergone losses of a malicious feat. In March, a bad actor used a donation for siphon nearly a million dollars in the protocol.
In a donation attack, the operator sends malicious tokens to the portfolio of a victim to attract them by interacting with contaminated tokens in a way that exposes their funds to theft.
$ 2 billion and count
Pirates and exploiters used phishing, donation attacks and several other attack vectors to steal more than $ 2 billion this year, which is already more than total figures recorded in 2024.
Most of the losses of this year come from crypto exchange of $ 1.4 billion, the largest crypto hack.
Osato Avan-Nomayo is our DEFI correspondent based in Nigeria. It covers Defi and Tech. Do you have a tip? Please contact him at Osato@dlnews.com.
