An unidentified cybercriminal successfully raised around $200 million from decentralized finance lender Euler Finance on Monday. The attack, which stole millions of dollars in crypto assets such as DAI and USD Coin, has been hailed as the biggest crypto hack of the year.If this year is like 2022, when Hackers stole over $3 billion in cryptocurrencyEuler’s theft is not the last.
Eulerdescribes itself as a team of software engineers “specializing in research and development of financial applications” and is the developer behind “a capital efficient permissionless lending protocol”. Hedge volatile markets without the need for a trusted third party. Unfortunately, trusted third parties may actually have been useful to some extent in terms of protecting user assets from those who hijacked them.
One of the first companies to discover this attack was Peckshield, a blockchain security company known for flagging irregular asset transfers. On Monday, Peckshield tweeted a link showing his transfer from Euler was unusually high.
Euler confirmed that it was aware, reply“We are aware and our team is currently working with security experts and law enforcement.”
Late Monday, Euler murmured: “We continue to investigate the unauthorized withdrawal of funds from the Euler Protocol this morning. We have taken several immediate steps to recover the funds and identify exactly what happened, including working with auditors and security firms.”
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Another blockchain security company, SlowMist, guessed that the theft was carried out using what is known as a “flash loan attack”; Such attacks manipulate smart contracts of cryptocurrency lenders to borrow large amounts of cryptocurrency without posting collateral.
That said, it’s unclear what law enforcement can actually do in this case, or whether users will inevitably get their money back. Crypto robbery of recent memorythe victim could be up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
