Mango Markets Loses over $100 Million in a Price Manipulation Hack
Mango Markets, a Solana Decentralized Finance platform, lost more than $100 million in a price manipulation attack.
The $100 Million Breach
Mango Markets confirmed that an effective hack had occurred on its treasury. According to the tweet by the DeFi Platform, the malicious attackers made away with a large number of digital assets through an oracle manipulation of price.
The DeFi protocol said it is contacting the appropriate people to find the crooks and stop them from distributing the funds. Mango has also advised its users to halt using the platform until the problem has been fixed and the funds possibly frozen and recovered.
The attack reportedly occurred on Tuesday, 12th of October, the same day the Twitter announcement was made.
Mango stated in the Tweet:
“We are currently investigating an incident where a hacker was able to drain funds from Mango via an oracle price manipulation. We are taking steps to have third parties freeze funds in flight.”
Audit reports from the blockchain audit company, OtterSec, proclaimed that hackers must have been able to “manipulate” the Mango collateral. The manipulation enabled them to obtain large debts from the platform’s treasury. Observers said hackers spiked their collateral value, allowing them to take out massive loans from Mango’s ecosystem. A twitter user analyzed that the attackers sucked more than $100 million.
“It appears the attacker was able to manipulate their Mango collateral. They temporarily spiked up their collateral value, and then took out massive loans from the Mango treasury.”
The hackers made away with the funds distributed in several digital assets. 52.8 million USDC, 50.5 million USD SOL, $5.4 million BTC, 3.2 million USDT, 1.7 million USDT, and 14.7 million USD MNGO are among the tokens that the hackers allegedly withdrew.
Post-Effect of the Breach on MNGO Token
Following the hacker’s pump price manipulation, the price of the MNGO coin was severely affected, plummeting a whopping 47.4% from its previous level before The cyber-criminals executed the hack.
Off late, the Solana blockchain has experienced numerous failures, decreased performance, and network instability. For instance, Solana experienced a significant outage on September 30th, 2022, that took several hours to restore. Security problems have also affected Solana-based applications. A recent case involved a $5 million Slope Wallet attack.
The Increased Insecurity in DeFi
The number of cryptocurrency hacks has increased tremendously to new highs than ever witnessed before. In less than 24 hours, four more hacks have been reported, including the Mango attack, a possible world record for the most crypto cyber attacks in a day. Among the attacks is Rabby Swap, which faced a smart contract exploit that resulted in a $200,000 loss.
Meanwhile, ParaSwap was found to have a vulnerable deployer address causing a leak of funds in multiple chains. In addition, Temple Dao’s stax.fi was hacked, and the attackers made away with 1,831 ETH.
This recent Mango Markets attack is just the latest in a succession of breaches that have lately been directed at the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Last week, Binance’s BNB was compromised, costing the Smart Chain more than $100 million. The exploit was a cross-chain bridge on the BSC Token Hub, resulting in the creation of extra BNB. Binance resumed in-chain activities and yesterday announced a hard fork upgrade to prevent such breaches.
