BlockThreat - Week 5, 2024
Ripple | Abracadabra | Binance | CheckDot | Affine | ADC | Iron Bank | Reservoir
Greetings!
The mystery behind the $477m FTX compromise in November of 2022 may have been solved. According to the recent DoJ indictment, the theft occurred as a result of a SIM-swap attack used to bypass 2FA. That’s $477m accessible by a single compromised employee and guarded by an SMS 2FA. Wild, but unsurprising given what we know about the state of FTX security before its collapse!
A massive private key compromise of Ripple’s Chris Larsen resulted in the theft of $112.5m. Siphoning of funds lasted for more than 11 hours and was later noticed by ZachXBT a day later. Binance was able to save $4.5m, as the stolen funds quickly moved to various exchanges.
A concerning trend is emerging around rounding error exploits. Starting with the $851k Hope Lending hack in October, 2023, there was a new hack involving this attack vector almost every other week. Channels ($320k), Radiant ($4.5m), Channels again ($250k), Wise Lending ($464k), and now Abracadabra ($6.5m).
In fact, if we look at the updated Top 10 DeFi Exploitation Vectors list so far this year, Rounding Errors is now prominently occupying number 2 slot right after Stolen Private Keys and above the traditional Price Oracle Manipulation attack vectors:
Stolen Private Keys - 5 - $27.2m
Rounding Errors - 4 - $11.7m
Price Oracle Manipulation - 4 - $8.1m
Arbitrary External Calls - 4 - $3.5m
Function Parameter Validation - 1 - $3.3m
Reward Manipulation - 4 - $239k
Insufficient Function Access Controls - 2 - $323k
Reentrancy - 2 - $310k
Misconfiguration - 1 - $60k
Spear-phishing - 1
PSA: DeFi developers and auditors should add rounding errors to your top exploitation vector checks.
This week also featured a number of smaller compromises not more than $100k each. It’s as if someone is systematically sweeping all chains for the most obvious exploits like an exposed delegatecall or a weak reward calculation logic.
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In other news, deepfakes are getting more realistic already tricking someone in TradFi to send $25m. Be on the lookout for high quality deepfakes hitting crypto soon!
Let’s dive into the news!