Following a recent attack on Celo blockchain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol Moola Market, the attacker has returned over 93% of stolen funds with about a half-million dollar as bug bounty as per a post.
The DeFi platform agreed to the proposal that the attacker should take a $500,000 bounty while refunding the outstanding $9 million worth of cryptocurrencies to the platform.
Moola Market team maintains that it has paused all activity on the protocol and has also offered a bug bounty if the exploiter returns funds.
A critical investigation into the ordeal by Web3 security company Hacken reveals that the attacker manipulated the price of the protocol’s native token, MOO, by buying around $45,000 worth and depositing it as collateral to borrow Celo token.
Thereafter, the borrowed CELO coupled with the CELO provided by the attacker were then used to borrow more MOO, thereby pushing up the price of the token.
It was gathered that the attacker keeps repeating the process until the MOO token price increased by 6,400%
Given the inflated token price, the attacker was successfully able to borrow $6.6 million worth of CELO, $1.2 million of MOO coupled with $740,000 of Cello Euros (cEUR) and $644,000 Celo Dollars (cUSD). All accumulating to $9.1 million
Meanwhile, Moola Market has confirmed the receipt of 93.1% of the stolen funds to its Moola governance multi-sig.
Rise of Crypto Hacks And Bug Bounty
More than ever before, there is an increasing rise in the number of crypto hacks and bug bounty. Like Moola Market, Solana-based DeFi Mango Market also experienced similar attack on Oct. 11
As a consequence, the attacker also proposed an offer to return the $117million stolen funds while retaining $47 million as a bug bounty.
Recall that October has been dubbed as the biggest month for crypto hacks according to Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.
It reports that 11 different Decentralized Finance (DeFI) protocols have been attacked in the month of October. Some of the victims include blockchain QANpatform Ethereum bridge, Mango Market, among others.
