Millions lost as exploits hit major platforms Mango, Lamden, Binance and others by GetNews

Earlier in the month exploiters attacked the Solana-based decentralized finance platform, Mango, extracting nearly $114 in funds. The exploiters were able to manipulate the platform’s native token MNGO via loopholes in the smart contract protocol. One of the exploiters later returned $67 million of the funds.  

On October 18, Moola, a decentralized finance platform on the Celo blockchain, reported a breach of $9 million. The hacker manipulated the price of the platform’s MOO token to then borrow a large amount of tokens using the MOO as collateral which enabled them to drain the protocol of funds. The hacker negotiated a bounty and returned nearly 90% of the funds.  

The Binance Smart Chain was hit by an even larger exploit on October 7. Nearly $570 million was stolen when a hacker minted an additional two million BNB tokens, the native token for Binance.  

In late September, the Python-based blockchain platform Lamden was impacted by a hacker who created a contract that was able to modify the blockchain state and mint tokens to the value of nearly $250,000. The hack was quickly identified and the bridge used to move tokens from Lamden to BSC was frozen. This allowed the team to recover a portion of the stolen funds.  

According to a report by Token Terminal, “Bridge exploits account for around 50 percent of all DeFi exploits, totaling ~$2.5 billion in lost assets.” This reinforces the need for better testing, bounty programs, and auditing processes. 

Many of the hacks have been performed by bad actors but there are some white hat hackers, ethical hackers who search for exploits to collect bounties, who’ve exploited the vulnerabilities but immediately returned the funds.  

As an example, the Olympus DAO smart contract was exploited for nearly $300,000 but returned within hours. 

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