Story of a DeFi Protocol Hacker Who Failed to Take the $1 Million Sack

Vignesh Karunanidhi
Story of a DeFi Protocol Hacker Who Failed to Take the $1 Million Sack
Source: Entrepreneur

A hacker exploited the DeFi protocol Zeed but failed to take $1 million in profits after destroying the contract.

The event sounds so good to be true. It is one of the rarest moments that can be labeled as a successful failure. The DeFi space is not new to hacks and exploits. The ecosystem has suffered some of the largest hacks to date that happened in the crypto space.

One such event happened with the DeFi protocol Zeed which hackers recently exploited.

Source: Economic Times

The hacker who failed to flee with the funds

The less popular DeFi protocol Zeed was a victim of a recent exploit. The hackers exploited the reward distribution vulnerability of Zeed on the BSC chain. The attack was detected by the BlockSecteam, who alerted about the attack on Twitter.

Zeed, an autonomous decentralized financial integrated ecosystem, faced the attack around 7:15 AM UTC.

Basically, when a user swapped in the pair, the token will reward the pair, by diving the reward into three different pairs. However, the project has a vulnerability that distributes the rewards without diving into three pairs.

BlockSecTeam

The attacker invoked the skim function of the pair to get the tokens. The rewards were then sold, crashing the Zeed token price to zero.

Source: Peckshield Twitter

The hacker then killed the contract he used in the exploit without moving the funds. That clearly means that the hacker cannot move the tokens in the contract.

“The hacker kills the contract, but forgets to transfer the profit,”

PeckShield

The $1 million gains of the exploiter sit in the attack contract. BlockSec said that “probably he/she was too excited.” There has been no clarity on the reason that prevented the hacker from moving the funds. Instead, it will remain an unsolved mystery of a hacker who was clever enough to hack a protocol but dumb enough not to take the funds.