Attackers Steals $2 million from cryptocurrency service
“Cryptocurrency service Akropolis suffered a “Flash Loan” Attack”
Cryptocurrency borrowing and lending service Akropolis stated that a hacker used a “flash loan” attack against their platform to stole roughly $2 million worth of Dai cryptocurrency.
The attack happened the day before yesterday afternoon (GMT time zone), and Akropolis admins paused all transactions on the platform to stop further losses.
Akropolis says that while it hired two firms to research the incident, neither company was ready to pinpoint the attack vectors utilized in the exploit.
Moreover, the intrusion was identified as a “flash loan” attack.
Flash loan attacks have become common against the cryptocurrency services running on DeFi (decentralized finance) platforms that allow all the users to borrow or lend using cryptocurrency, spectate the variations of price, and earn a amount of interest on cryptocurrency savings-like accounts.
Flash loan attacks happen when hackers loan funds from a DeFi platform (like Akropolis) on the other hand use exploits within the platform code to flee the loan mechanism and obtain away with the funds.
These attacks are growing in numbers since early February this year, and one among the most important flash loan attacks happened last month, in OCTOBER. When hackers stole abou the sum of $24 million worth of cryptocurrency assets from DeFi service Harvest Finance.
The good news is that Akropolis says it’s already identified the attacker’s Ethereum account, which might allow it to trace funds as they move around the blockchain.
The DeFi platform says it has already provided the notification to the major cryptocurrency exchanges about the hack, and therefore, the attacker’s wallet in an effort to possess funds frozen and stop the attacker from laundering funds into other sorts of cryptocurrencies, lose the investigators, tracks, and leave the funds.
Akropolis also said that they are currently exploring the ways to reimburse users for the loss.
