Attackers attacked the Moola Market DeFi platform based on the Celo blockchain. The damage amounted to about $8.4 million in several tokens.
“It was an incredibly simple attack,” commented Igor Igamberdiev, head of research at The Block.
Hackers transferred 243,000 CELOS from Binance to the protocol. They used the funds to borrow 1.8 million native MOO tokens. Artificially inflating the price of the coin, they were able to collect loans in other assets under its collateral and withdraw them.
The Moola Market team suspended the platform and launched an investigation. She appealed to the attackers, warning that she had attracted law enforcement officers to block the liquidation of stolen funds.
After that, unknown persons returned 93.1% of the withdrawn assets.
According to Igamberdiev’s calculations, the hackers left 700,000 CELO (~$0.5 million) as a bounty reward. Of this amount, they sent 50,000 tokens to the impactMarket financial platform address.
“I can confirm that 50,000 CELOS were sold for cUSD and donated via impactMarket to support thousands of vulnerable families from 30 developing countries as unconditional income,” wrote the project’s founder Marco Barbosa.
“We did not participate in this,” he clarified.
Despite the incident, the price of the MOO token has increased by almost 18.5% in the last 24 hours, according to DEX Screener. However, the service warns about the low liquidity of the asset.
Data: DEX Screener.
Recall that October has already become a record month in terms of stolen funds in the field of DeFi. On the 13th, as a result of 11 attacks, hackers withdrew $718 million from the protocols, according to Chainalysis.
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