Moola Market immediately notified law enforcement agencies that it was compromised and offered to negotiate with the attacker. The Celo-based DeFi lending protocol was hit with an exploit on October 18. The platform rapidly issued a warning on Twitter and urged its community not to trade mTokens.
The Moola Market Hack Overview
At around 2 PM ET, Moola Market stopped its activity. Based on their explanation, it happened due to a continuous investigation of a recent exploit that supposedly stole took $8.4 million. Moola warned the attacker that law enforcement has been contacted and these measures were taken to make the liquidation of the stolen assets as challenging as possible.
In the same publication, Moola Market offered the exploiter a possible lifeline. They said that they were willing to negotiate a “bounty payment in exchange for returning the funds within the next 24 hours.” The exploiter took various tokens with CELO accounting for up to $6.5 million.
Based on the early analysis, the exploiter used CELO from Binance to borrow a huge amount of Moola tokens and began pumping their value. MOO experienced a steep spike in price surging from $0.018 to nearly $5.6 within one hour. The price consequently dropped but remained a little above the previous value for hours standing at about $0.36.
Is October The Worst Month For Crypto Hacks So Far In 2022?
Barely a day before the Moola Market exploit, another crypto hack took place. BitKeep Swap was compelled to suspend service to contain the hack that supposedly stole $1 million. While it is not yet clear how the Moola to exploit will unravel, BitKeep promised to compensate all victims of what they termed as a “security incident”.
Despite taking several millions of dollars, the two most recent crypto hacks are quite far from the biggest in October. Earlier in the month, both the BNB Chain and Mango Markets were attacked and robbed for a staggering $200 million.
Buy Bitcoin NowAlthough the BNB attack ended up being less severe than it was initially feared, and the Mango Markets platform retrieved most of the funds after the identity of the hacker was revealed, October remains a bad month for crypto hacks.
Based on data from Chainalysis, October is shaping up to become the largest month in “the biggest year ever for hacking activity.” An FBI report from August showed that 2022 is shaping up to become a very bad year for crypto hacks as $1.3 billion was stolen in Q1 alone.
