Ad
News
DeFi risks; Hackers drain $500k in LINK, wrapped ETH, and other alts from Balancer pools DeFi risks; Hackers drain $500k in LINK, wrapped ETH, and other alts from Balancer pools
๐Ÿšจ This article is 4 years old...

DeFi risks; Hackers drain $500k in LINK, wrapped ETH, and other alts from Balancer pools

DeFi risks; Hackers drain $500k in LINK, wrapped ETH, and other alts from Balancer pools

Photo by Javier Garcรญa on Unsplash

Hackers made away with $500k worth of Wrapped Ether, Chainlink, and Synthetix from Balancer pools early on Monday, after a deflationary token model was taken advantage of.

Balancer addressed the issue soon after, confirming the hack and stating the protocol was not compromised. All other tokens remain unaffected, and the exchange continues to function.

$500k stolen

Two balancer pools were affected on Monday morning after hackers used a vulnerability in the contract models of a token, Statera (STA), which runs on a โ€œdeflationaryโ€ model.

Balancer pools are a type of automated market makers (AMM), providing on-chain liquidity for multiple assets and keeping them balanced in certain proportions.

For the incident, hackers sent a complex transaction to Ethereum Mainnet which caused an attack on one of the Balancer Pools, as per a report by 1inch exchange, a DEX aggregator. Soon after, another transaction led to the draining of funds from another Balancer Pool.

Using a sophisticated approach, the attacker used an automated smart contract to run multiple actions in a single transaction. The first step involved taking out a โ€œFlashLoanโ€ of 104k WETH from dYdX (another DEX).ย 

The funds were used to swap WETH to STA token over 24 times, causing STA balances to be drained until it became 1 weiSTA (0.000000000000000001 STA).

The above was possible as the STA token ran on a deflationary model with transfer fee of 1 percent charged from a recipient. This meant every time the attacker swapped WETH to STA, the Balancer pool received 1 percent less STA than was expected, 1inch noted, adding:

โ€œAs the next step, the attacker swapped 1 weiSTA to WETH multiple times. Due to STA token transfer fee implementation, the pool never received STA but released WETH regardless.โ€

Full circle and DeFi risks

Similar steps were used to drain WBTC, SNX, and LINK token balances from the pool. The hacker reached full circle by repaying the WETH FlashLoan dYdX. All the stolen funds can be tracked and viewable on this address.ย 

STA was advised of its deflationary model being broken before listing on Balancer, as some on Twitter observed:

At press time, STA is down over 80 percent. Relevant tweets on the subject show the community is not pleased, and some are threatening legal action against Balancer.

Meanwhile, โ€œHex Capitalโ€ claimed to have appraised the issue to Balancer Labs at an earlier time, but receiving no response on the subject:

Mentioned in this article
Posted In: , DeFi, Hacks