Moola Market, a DeFi and non-custodial liquidity protocol on Celo, was attacked a few hours ago. Customers can earn compound interest on deposits or take out over-collateralized, delegated, and flash loans.
The DeFi and crypto ecosystem went into a frenzy when the block researcher, Igor Igamberdiev, tweeted about the attack.
Igor Igamberdiev tweeted about the Moola vulnerability. He explained the $8.4 million exploitation on the platform. In what seemed to be an artificial pump price attack, the hacker stole about 243,000 CELO tokens from Binance.
The attacker proceeded to borrow 1.8 million of Moola's MOO tokens and loaned 60,000 CELO to the Moola platform. Shortly after, the attacker began pumping the price of MOO tokens by borrowing more tokens against the existing CELO.
During the attack, they made away with about 1.8 million MOO tokens worth $655,000, 8.8 million CELO worth about $6.5 million, 765,000 cEUR worth about $750,000, and 644,000 USD worth about $639,000.
It is worthy of note that all these tokens are stablecoins attached to Celo. And since they got access to the Moola market, they could access these tokens too.
However, the Moola market team acknowledged the attack and issued a press statement via their Twitter page. They said "they are actively investigating [the] incident" while announcing the temporary suspension of all platform activities.
Similarly, they cautioned users against trading mTokens, Moola's interest-bearing tokens. To liquidate the stolen funds, the Moola market team announced that they had contacted law enforcement.
Asides from that, there is a reward set aside for the perpetrator if they can return the stolen assets within the next 24 hours.
You would recall that earlier this month, quite a several Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols were attacked.
For instance, the Temple DAO lost about $2.3 million, Mango Markets was robbed of about $100 million, while the BNB chain lost about $536 million to a similar attack. The report has it that about $718 million was stolen across 11 different attacks in October.
While we are still grappling with multiple DeFi hacks, the Moola market exploit has struck.
In what seemed to be an "incredibly simple attack," the same exploit keeps recurring in the DeFi ecosystem.
Events like these are a dent in the blockchain network and are discouraging mass adoption. Few government bodies or individuals would want to confide in a financial system that lacks absolute security.
It is now up to the blockchain developers and experts to deduce a means to protect wallets.
Disclaimer: Voice of Crypto aims to deliver accurate and up-to-date information but will not be responsible for any missing facts or inaccurate information. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile financial assets, so research and make your own financial decisions.