2022The year in breaches

An owner-key compromise added a fake collateral token to Defrost Finance on Avalanche, liquidating all positions for ~$12M. Most funds were returned to users.

A breach of LastPass encrypted vault backups led to a multi-year drain of victims storing seed phrases there; losses grew from $35M to over $400M.

$4.4M drained from Raydium's Solana liquidity pools after malware stole the pool-admin private key, then used admin functions to withdraw fees.

Lodestar on Arbitrum lost $6.5M after its plvGLP oracle ignored donate() inflating GLP assets, letting the attacker borrow against 83%-inflated collateral.

Lodestar on Arbitrum lost $6.5M after the attacker manipulated the plvGLP oracle, which read GLP pool state directly, to inflate collateral and borrow reserves.

Stolen Ankr developer key let an attacker mint 60 trillion aBNBc, which Helio accepted as collateral to lend out $16M of HAY before Binance froze $3M.

SIM-swap operation drained $477M from FTX wallets within hours of the Chapter 11 filing, exploiting the chaos of crypto's biggest collapse since Mt. Gox.

$3.2M drained from Skyward Finance on NEAR via a treasury accounting flaw that let the attacker redeem SKYWARD repeatedly against the same balance.

Attacker drained $28M from Deribit BTC/ETH/USDC hot wallets; the largest crypto-options exchange covered it from its balance sheet, cold storage untouched.

Team Finance lost $15.8M in a Uniswap v2-to-v3 migration: locked tokens moved to a skewed v3 pair and refunded as 'leftover' for $2,700 in gas. $7M returned.

$1.1M drained from Sovryn, a Bitcoin-DeFi protocol on RSK, via AMM/oracle price manipulation that let the attacker borrow against inflated collateral.

$8.4M extracted from Celo's Moola Market: attacker bought MOO with $243K of CELO, pumped it 300x, used as collateral; 93.1% returned for a $500K bounty.

Avraham Eisenberg pumped the MNGO oracle 2,300% in 10 minutes, borrowed $117M against the inflated collateral, and walked — reframing on-chain manipulation law.

$2.3M drained from TempleDAO's StaxLPStaking after migrateStake() failed to validate the caller, letting anyone migrate another staker's full position.

A flawed Merkle proof verification in BSC's native bridge let the attacker forge withdrawals for 2M BNB before validators paused the chain.

Transit Swap users with infinite approvals lost $21M when claimTokens failed to validate which token to call transferFrom on. 70% returned after on-chain talks.

Wintermute lost $160M from a hot wallet whose Profanity-generated vanity address used a 32-bit PRNG seed that let any 'random' key be brute-forced. They knew.

Attackers hijacked curve.fi's DNS via its domain registrar and served a wallet-drainer frontend, stealing ~$575K from users while the contracts were untouched.

~9,231 Solana wallets lost $4.1M after Slope Wallet's app logged users' seed phrases in plain text to a Sentry server, traced back via on-chain forensics.

A routine upgrade marked the zero hash as a valid root, turning every Nomad message into a withdrawal anyone could copy-paste.

A $10M USDC flash loan inflated Nirvana's ANA token 4x against its own oracle; the attacker swapped ANA for $13.49M USDT and the NIRV stablecoin depegged 90%.

An attacker exploited an Audius contract-initializer flaw to self-delegate 10 trillion AUDIO and pass a malicious proposal that drained $6M from the treasury.

A fake tick account bypassed Crema's owner check and harvested fictitious fees via CLMM accounting, draining $9.6M on Solana. $8M returned in white-hat deal.

Lazarus compromised two of five operator multi-sig keys on Harmony's cross-chain bridge and drained $100M; the 2-of-5 quorum was below its risk profile.

Gym Network on BNB Chain lost $2.1M after a deposit function accepted a referrer signature without validating it, letting the attacker mint huge GYMNET rewards.

Fortress Protocol on BNB Chain lost $3M after the attacker manipulated FTS via a thin oracle and used a governance proposal to set arbitrary collateral factors.

MM Finance users on Cronos lost $2M after the attacker exploited an unclaimed config to swap the DEX frontend's router address, redirecting swap approvals.

Reentrancy on exitMarket() drained $80M from Rari Capital's Fuse lending pools, a function the team forgot to protect when patching reentrancy the prior month.

Saddle's sUSDv2 metapool lost $11.9M when a known MetaSwapUtils bug was redeployed by mistake; BlockSec's bots front-ran $3.97M to safety, cutting the net loss.

DEUS DAO lost $13.4M after pricing DEI collateral from a Solidly DEI/USDC pool that a flash-loan attacker moved, borrowing out the lending reserves.

A $1B flash loan bought 67% of Beanstalk governance in one block, long enough to pass a proposal that drained the treasury. Attacker netted $76M of $182M lost.

$15.6M drained from Inverse Finance by manipulating its Keep3r INV/ETH oracle via a private mempool bundle, bypassing TWAP in a single invisible block.

Voltage Finance's Fuse lending market lost $4M when ERC-677 tokens' transferAndCall hook enabled a reentrancy into the borrow function before debt was recorded.

$2M drained from Revest Finance via a reentrancy in mintAddressLock/depositAdditionalToFNFT that let the attacker mint over-valued NFTs and redeem them.

Two missing collateral checks let an attacker mint 2 billion fake CASH stablecoins on Cashio, dropping TVL from $48M to zero in one transaction.

Validator private-key compromise drained 173,600 ETH and 25.5M USDC from the Ronin bridge — the largest crypto hack at the time.

A joint cross-function reentrancy exploit drained ~$11M from Agave and Hundred Finance on Gnosis Chain via wETH/wXDAI's ERC-677-style transfer callback.

~$1.7M drained from Paraluni on BNB Chain after the deposit function accepted an unvalidated token with no reentrancy guard, letting a fake token re-enter.

~$1.4M of NFTs stolen from TreasureDAO's marketplace after the buy function failed to check that quantity produced a non-zero price, enabling free buys.

A private-key compromise drained $10M from Dego Finance across Ethereum and BNB Chain, sweeping liquidity pools and user wallets with active token approvals.

$8.7M drained from Superfluid after a malicious 'context' passed to its host contract let the attacker spoof the caller and execute privileged streams.

Meter Passport bridge lost $4.4M when its deposit handler trusted a wrapped-token transfer amount that could be set without backing, minting bridged BNB/ETH.

A signature-verification bypass on Wormhole's Solana side let the attacker mint 120,000 wETH out of thin air — backed by no Ethereum collateral.

An attacker tricked Qubit's BSC bridge into minting 77,162 qXETH ($185M nominal) without depositing any ETH, borrowing 206,809 BNB ($80M).

2FA-bypass exploit drained $34M from 483 Crypto.com accounts; attackers authorised transactions without the second factor ever prompting the user.

Certik-audited Arbix Finance on Arbitrum minted 10M ARBX to attacker addresses, drained $10M in user deposits, and erased its entire web and social presence.

~$3M drained from Tinyman, Algorand's main AMM, via a swap/burn logic flaw in pool-token operations that let attackers extract assets across many pools.