By Larry Wright
Just a few days ago, cryptocurrency community members were trying to deal with the news about the massive exploit on Solana DeFi protocols. Now another bond has been added to the series of unfortunate occurrences. An unidentified hacker has managed to steal $3 million worth of wrapped NEAR tokens from Skyward Finance.
The Skyward developers have posted about the incident to update their users. According to the update, the DeFi protocol was hit by a contract exploit. The matter is under investigation by a cyber-security firm called BlockSec. The users are not directly hit by the attack, but they stand to suffer indirectly by hackers taking control of such a massive reserve of one crypto token.
The update by the DeFi protocol has confirmed that the wrapped NEAR tokens that the hacker stole were not in supply. The hacker targeted the treasury of the DeFi protocol to siphon off 1.1 million NEAR tokens. It is worth noting that Skyward is a permissioned network that is open to everyone.
The increasing incidents about DeFi protocols under the attack of exploits have opened a Pandora’s Box of discussion among the cryptocurrency community members. Solana is another such protocol that has been consistently under siege by hackers and cyber attackers.
BlockSec Finds a Bug in Near Protocol
The main point concerns among DeFi users are whether these enterprises are overlooking the necessary technical audit to ensure security for their clients. Furthermore, hackers gaining control of one token in large quantities can give them the freedom to manipulate the market or crash prices at their discretion.
Cyber security firm BlockSec which is investigating the Near Protocol exploit, has found a bug in the token-redemption feature. The bug prevents the protocol from checking for duplicate IDs. In the last month alone, the overall DeFi ecosystem has suffered from 44 isolated events of exploits losing around $650 million to threat actors.