Ostium loses at least $24 million to oracle exploit

Decentralized perpetual futures exchange Ostium was drained of at least $24 million after an attacker manipulated its oracle system — a system that pulls in off-chain price data. After the attacker apparently gained access to the private key used to sign oracle messages, they were able to submit future-dated oracle reports that tricked the system into thinking trades were profitable.

The attacker siphoned at least $24 million USDC from the protocol, which they quickly swapped into ETH and laundered via Tornado Cash.

Bonzo Lend exploited for $9 million in oracle attack

The Hedera-based decentralized lending platform Bozno Lend was exploited for just over $9 million after an attacker took advantage of a flaw in the project's oracle system. The attacker was able to deposit tokens worth only a few dollars, then manipulate the project's oracle to reflect a dramatically higher price. They then borrowed $6.63 million in USDC and 34.5 million wrapped HBAR (~$2.4 million).

Bonzo has announced they will reimburse users affected by the exploit, with support from the Hedera Foundation.

YieldBlox lending pool drained of $10.2 million

A lending pool operated by YieldBlox on the Stellar blockchain was emptied of around $10.2 million in an oracle manipulation attack on the Reflector oracle supplying prices for the USTRY/USDC market. Reflector has said that there was no flaw with their oracle, and that market illiquidity caused the problem. "Reflector quoted correct prices. ... but it's impossible to quote adequate prices for a market fully handled by a single market-maker with almost zero trading activity."

The attacker was able to manipulate the oracle price to show that USTRY was priced at $100 (rather than its actual trading price of around $1.05). Then, they borrowed against the overvalued asset, withdrawing XLM and USDC priced at $10.2 million. However, around 48 million of the stolen XLM (~$7.2 million) were frozen.

Moonwell accrues almost $3.7 million of bad debt after oracle malfunction

The Moonwell lending protocol, built on the Base Ethereum L2, wound up with $3.7 million in bad debt after an attacker took advantage of an oracle malfunction that caused the price of wrsETH to be massively inflated. The Chainlink oracle used by the project erroneously reported that a single wrsETH token (Kelp DAO's wrapped restaked ETH) was priced at around 1.65 million ETH (~$5.8 billion). Within 30 seconds of the oracle reporting bad data, an attacker took advantage of the error to borrow huge amounts of tokens, which they then swapped to other tokens to cash out.

Ultimately the attacker profited around 295 ETH (~$1 million), but the protocol was saddled with significantly more bad debt that the team will now have to grapple with.

Nemo Protocol exploited for $2.4 million

The Nemo Protocol on the Sui blockchain suffered a $2.4 million exploit. The defi yield infrastructure protocol acknowledged the theft shortly after, explaining they had paused the protocol smart contracts as they investigated the theft. It appears the thief was able to manipulate a price oracle, siphoning $2.4 million in USDC from the project. They then bridged the funds from Arbitrum to Ethereum.

KiloEx exploited for $7.5 million

KiloEx, a decentralized perpetual futures exchange, was exploited for $7.5 million. An attacker executed an oracle manipulation attack on KiloEx's pricing smart contracts to steal funds across the Base Ethereum layer-2 chain, BNB Chain, and Taiko.

KiloEx halted trading on the platform while investigating the exploit, and contacted the hacker to try to negotiate a 90% return of funds.

KiloEx later announced that the recovery had been successful, and that they would pay out the 10% "bounty".

Polter Finance exploited for $12 million

The Fantom-based Polter Finance defi project was exploited for $7 million when an attacker was able to perform an oracle manipulation attack. By artificially increasing the price of the $BOO token, which is a governance token used by the SpookySwap project, they were then able to use that token to drain Polter's liquidity pools using a flash loan. The attacker successfully drained the entire $12 million worth of tokens on the platform.

The creator of the platform stated that they had filed a police report with Singaporean authorities. They also attempted to contact the hacker via on-chain message to negotiate the return of funds, but have not received a response.

UwU Lend suffers almost $20 million hack

The defi lending protocol UwU Lend was hacked for around $20 million. After various blockchain security firms observed suspicious outflows of funds, the protocol acknowledged there had been a "situation" on their Twitter account, and wrote that they had paused the protocol while they were investigating.

UwU Lend was founded by Michael Patryn, aka Omar Dhanani, aka "0xSifu" — a co-founder of the ill-fated QuadrigaCX exchange and ex-con. He also pseudonymously ran the defi cryptocurrency project Wonderland until his identity was revealed after the protocol suffered a meltdown.

WOOFi hacked for $8.75 million

An attacker was able to use a flash loan attack to manipulate an oracle on the WooFi DEX implementation on the Arbitrum network. By manipulating the price of $WOO, they were able to steal around $8.5 million.

Blockchain security firms detected the attack quickly, and the project team paused the project's smart contract within fifteen minutes, but not before the millions were stolen. They contacted the attacker via an on-chain message to offer a 10% "bounty", later threatening that they had a "strong lead that we think will soon reveal the identity of the exploiter".

New Rodeo Finance project exploited for the second time in one week

An attacker manipulated a price oracle to drain 472 ETH (~$884,000) from Rodeo Finance, a new Arbitrum-based leveraged yield protocol. The thief then used Tornado Cash to tumble the funds, some of which they placed into staking programs. According to Rodeo Finance, the attacker initially exploited the protocol for closer to $1.7 million, but $810,000 was recovered. Small victories. Anyway, Rodeo paused the protocol, and stated that they are working on recovery plans.

This was actually the second attack to impact Rodeo Finance in a single week. On July 5, the same day as their public token launch, the project was exploited for around $90,000 thanks to a bug in a smart contract.

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