Moola Market attacker returns most of $9M looted for $500K bounty

An attacker has returned simply over 93% of the greater than $9 million price of cryptocurrencies they exploited from the Celo (CELO) blockchain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol Moola Market.

At round 6PM UTC on Oct. 18 the Moola Market crew tweeted it was investigating an incident and had paused all exercise, including it had contacted authorities and supplied a bug bounty to the exploiter if funds have been returned inside 24 hours.

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Evaluation of the exploit by Web3 safety firm Hacken shows the attacker manipulated the value of the protocols’ low-liquidity native MOO token by initially buying round $45,000 price and depositing it as collateral to borrow CELO.

The borrowed CELO, together with additional CELO supplied by the attacker, was then used as collateral to borrow extra MOO, driving up the token’s value. The attacker continued repeating this till the MOO token value had elevated by 6,400%.

With the inflated token value, the attacker was in a position to borrow $6.6 million price of CELO, $1.2 million of MOO, together with $740,000 of Cello Euros (cEUR) and $644,000 Celo {Dollars} (cUSD) all price multiples greater than their preliminary posted collateral ensuing within the protocol’s lack of round $9.1 million.

5 hours after the preliminary affirmation of the exploit, Moola Market tweeted it had acquired simply over 93% of the funds exploited, with the attacker seemingly conserving the remaining making round $500,000 as a bug bounty.

Following at the moment’s incident, 93.1% of funds have been returned to the Moola governance multi-sig. We have now continued to pause all exercise on Moola, and can observe up with the group about subsequent steps, and to soundly restart operations of the Moola protocol. (1/2) https://t.co/UsdN44X70X

— Moola Market (@Moola_Market) October 18, 2022

Moola Market didn’t instantly reply to Cointelegraph’s request for remark.

The assault attracts similarities to the $117 million exploit suffered by Mango Markets on Oct. 11 by which Avraham Eisenberg and his crew manipulated the value of the Solana (SOL)-based DeFi protocols’ native token to borrow cryptocurrencies with an undercollateralized backing. Eisenberg negotiated to maintain $47 million as a “bounty.”

Associated: BNB Chain responds with subsequent steps for cross-chain safety after community exploit

Multi-chain cryptocurrency pockets BitKeep additionally suffered an exploit late on Oct. 17 with an attacker making off with $1 million price of Binance Coin (BNB) via a service used to swap tokens, BitKeep says it can absolutely reimburse any affected customers.

The assaults are the newest in a collection of exploits to have taken place in October which has additionally formed as much as be the most important month ever for hacking exercise with the overall hacked worth reaching round $718 million up till Oct. 12 in response to analytics agency Chanalysis.