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Maiar decentralized crypto exchange goes offline after bug discovery

June 7, 2022 Coin Telegraph

The DEX has been taken offline due to the discovery of the bug, and the team has implemented an “emergency fix” and update.

The Maiar Exchange, a decentralized exchange (DEX) native to the Elrond blockchain, has been temporarily taken offline after an attacker utilized an exploit and made off with roughly $113 million worth of Elrond eGold (EGLD).

Minutes before 12:00 am UTC on Monday, the co-founder and CEO of Elrond, Beniamin Mincu, tweeted that he and his team were “investigating a set of suspicious activities” on the Maiar decentralized cryptocurrency exchange.

Soon after, the DEX was taken offline, with Mincu reporting that the issue had been identified and an “emergency fix” was being implemented.

In a Twitter thread posted almost 24 hours later at around 11:00 pm UTC on Monday, Mincu said a potentially critical bug was identified that opened “an exploit area that we simply had to address and mitigate immediately.”

The suspicious activities have been possibly identified and explained in a Twitter thread by pseudonymous on-chain analyst Foudres, who revealed that the potential attacker deployed a smart contract that somehow allowed them to withdraw over 1.65 million EGLD.

Three wallets were able to mysteriously withdraw 800,000, 400,000 and 450,000 EGLD, respectively, which at current prices is worth nearly $113 million in total.

The attackers were able to sell around 800,000 EGLD, worth around $54 million, which caused the price of EGLD on Maiar to plummet from $76 down to around $5. The rest of the crypto is either still held in various wallets, has been bridged to USD Coin (USDC) and Ether (ETH), or was sold on centralized exchanges.

The price of EGLD dropped 9.5% from around $74 down to a 24-hour low of $65.50 but has since slightly recovered, now trading near $68.

Mincu stated in his update that an upgrade was implemented to fix the bug and a technical explanation would be provided after clarification that the implemented solutions are tested and working.

He claimed that all funds are safe and will be available when the DEX restarts, which is scheduled for Tuesday, saying most exploited funds have been either recovered in full or will be covered by the Elrond Foundation.

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, approximately $1.6 billion in cryptocurrency has been stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms in the first quarter of 2022, and over 90% of all stolen crypto is from hacked decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols such as DEXs.

Hacker bungles DeFi exploit: Leaves stolen $1M in contract set to self destruct

April 22, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Hacker bungles DeFi exploit: Leaves stolen M in contract set to self destruct

attacker

A hacker apparently so thrilled by a successful theft left behind over $1 million in a smart contract that was set to destruct, permanently ensuring the crypto could never be moved.

In a rare comedic bungle among DeFi exploits, an attacker has fumbled their heist at the finish line leaving behind over $1 million in stolen crypto.

Just after 8AM UTC on Thursday April 21st, blockchain security and analytics firm BlockSec shared it had detected an attack on a little known DeFi lending protocol called Zeed, which styles itself a “decentralized financial integrated ecosystem”.

The attacker exploited a vulnerability in the way the protocol distributes rewards, allowing them to mint extra tokens which were then sold, crashing the price to zero, but netting just over $1 million for the exploiter.

Blockchain analytics firm PeckShield noted the stolen crypto was transferred to an “attack contract”, a smart contract which automatically and quickly executes the found exploit.

#PeckShieldAlert It appears that @zeedcommunity suffered an exploit. The exploiter gained ~$1m. The gains currently sit in the attack contract. https://t.co/bSHHGM623Q @peckshield https://t.co/jXVj0oGI8B
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) April 21, 2022

However the attacker was apparently so excited by their successful heist that they forgot to transfer over $1 million worth of stolen crypto out of their attack contract before they set it to self-destruct, permanently and irreversibly ensuring the funds can never be moved.

Interesting. The hacker kills the contract, but forgets to transfer the profit. https://t.co/HbS2fiztuc https://t.co/uApZyK8Uym pic.twitter.com/FwpZweNLHU
— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) April 21, 2022

Using a blockchain scanner to view the attack contract address shows that $1,041,237.57 worth of BSC-USD Binance-Peg token is forever stuck in the contract and the successful self-destruction of the contract was confirmed at 7:15AM UTC on April 21.

It's one of the more bizarre turns of events since the Polygon hacker did an “Ask Me Anything” using embedded messages on Ethereum(ETH) transactions after stealing $612 million from the protocol in August 2021. The question and answer session revealed the attacker hacked “for fun” and thought “cross-chain hacking is hot.”

This latest hack is on the smaller end regarding the amount stolen, and other DeFi protocol hacks have seen hundreds of millions siphoned off as with the recent Ronin bridge hack where attackers made off with over $600 million.

Other notable DeFi exploits include the $80 million worth of crypto stolen from Qubit Finance in January where attackers tricked the protocol into believing they had deposited collateral, allowing them to mint an asset representing a bridged crypto.

DeFi marketplace Deus Finance was exploited in March when hackers manipulated the price feed of a pair of stablecoins resulting in the insolvency of user funds, netting the hackers over $3 million.

crypto heist