A hacker wakes up – The protocols of the Decentralized finance are prime prey for hackers. Thus, several billion dollars in cryptocurrencies are stolen every year. In August, the DAO Maker protocol was the target of an attack resulting in the loss of $7 million.
7 million soared on DAO Maker
CAD Maker is a DeFi protocol that offers a decentralized crowdfunding platform. Note that this project has no connection with the Maker DAO protocol, which is the origin of the DAI stablecoin.
On August 12, the protocol DAO Maker was under attack. Thus, the attacker succeeded in stealing $7 million in cryptocurrency.
In practice, the attacker had managed to get his hands on a admin key of the protocol. As a result, he was able to steal some of the funds deposited in DAO Maker’s pools. A security breach which unfortunately had nothing to do with the code of smart contracts.
Following the attack, the DAO Maker teams announced that they had identified a address Binance linked to the attacker. However, a month later, this lead has still not resulted in the arrest of the attacker.
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The hacker wakes up: $500,000 moved
Friday, September 9, bots from analytics companies peck shield and Certik detected movements from one of the attacker’s addresses.
Thus, on the evening of September 8, he moved $500,000 in DAI between two of his addresses. Once the funds have been repatriated to his address, the attacker passed them through the Tornado Cash protocol. In total, the attacker made 5 deposits of 100,000 DAI to Tornado Cash.
Unsurprisingly, the striker’s goal is to blur the trail of funds. Indeed, Tornado Cash is a so-called mixer protocol hosted on Ethereum. Therefore, this allows to mix the tokens of several users in order to remove the link between sender and receiver of the transaction.
Tornado Cash still in turmoil
This new use of Tornado Cash as part of a DeFi hack does not help matters of protocol.
Indeed, this one is the target of many penalties, since the US Treasury decided to take it into its sights. Thus, the US Treasury blames the protocol and its developers forhave facilitated bleaching billions of dollars.
A situation that quickly escalated. Indeed, it resulted in numerous sanctions against Tornado Cash, its developers and users of the protocol. In turn, more and more protocols have censored transactions bound for Tornado Cash. Others have even gone so far as to block addresses that have already interacted with the protocol.
So that one of the developers, Alexey Pertsev, was even arrested in the Netherlands on August 10.
In some cases, the funds stolen by hackers can be recovered thanks to the coordination of several protocols and platforms. Recently, Axie Infinity was able to recover $30 million stolen during the hack led by Lazarus Group.
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