Web3 is Going Just Great

Roughly an hour after the attack, the project tweeted that they were aware of the attack, and had paused all markets. On June 19 the project sent a message to the attacker, pleading with them to return the funds and threatening: "There are criminal organizations following the same evidence trails we are. This isn't going away until you return funds. We are your best option out of this."

The attacker has already drained locked votes and sold some of the $TORN tokens, which are governance tokens that both entitle the holder to a vote but also were being traded for $5–$7 around the time of the attack. The attacker has since tumbled 360 ETH (~$655,300) through Tornado Cash to obscure its final destination. Meanwhile, $TORN plummeted in value more than 30% as the attacker dumped the tokens.

The attacker now has full control over the DAO, which according to crypto security researcher Sam Sun grants them the ability to withdraw all of the locked votes (as they did), drain all of the tokens in the governance contract, and "brick" (make permanently non-functional) the router.

The attacker began swapping tokens out for other stablecoins shortly after the exploit, moving them into lending projects like Aave and laundering them through the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer. There were early concerns that Aave itself was impacted by an exploit, but it was later clarified that Aave had simply been used to swap tokens involved in the Yearn exploit, and did not appear to itself be vulnerable.

This is not the first exploit involving Yearn Finance, which was hacked for $11 million in 2021, and which lost around $1.4 million in connection to the massive Euler Finance attack in March 2023.

Now, the FBI has accused two groups of North Korean hackers — Lazarus and APT38 — of perpetrating the Harmony hack. The groups then used Tornado Cash and RAILGUN to launder the funds.