Bent Finance faces serious exploit, urges pool investors to withdraw funds

Bent Finance, a staking and farming platform, has become the sixth cryptocurrency firm to face a digital attack in December. Following the acknowledgment of the hack, investors are requested to withdraw their pool funds. The compromised platform’s reward claims are also disabled.

Bent Finance discovered the exploit on Monday at approximately 8:55 p.m. EST, a time period during which the report showed no loss of funds. However, when blockchain investigator PeckShield purportedly discovered the source of the hack transactions, the community suspected a rug-pull.

We have located the hack tx, which interestingly is sent from the Bent Finance: Deployer @BENT_Finance !!! What is going on?! https://t.co/3L4F1gcNYJ

— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) December 21, 2021

“Yes, we notice the same thing and are addressing it immediately,” Bent Finance stated as the team hired two independent white hat developers to have a deeper grasp of the unfolding scenario. Soon afterward, the company confirmed the development.

1/ There was an exploit from the bent deployer address, it added balance of cvxcrv and mim to an address on an unvierifed update 20 days ago. We just discovered this today. There are multiple members on this team and we will make this right.

— Bent Finance 🌈🦄 (@BENT_Finance) December 21, 2021

Bent Finance is continuing to advise pool investors to withdraw their funds until the issue is resolved. The company has acknowledged, however, that it will recover all-cash plundered from the pool.

Joe McGill, a crypto fraud investigator at TRM Labs and former US Secret Service agent said that the attackers took around 440 Ether (ETH) worth more than $1.6 million at the time of publishing.

Bent Finance is not the only one to suffer this December

McGill’s investigations indicated that the hack has been active since December 12, contrary to Bent Finance’s conclusion that the attacker has been active on the network since December 1.

Five crypto firms, including BitMart (losing $196 million), Grim Finance, and AscendEX — collectively lost more than $600 million in December as a direct result of strong breaches. However, additional investigations are being designed to measure the extent of the Bent Finance attack’s damages.

Amidst the continued attacks on cryptocurrency firms, December saw a brief compromise of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Twitter account. As TheCoinRise reported, the attack was used to spread false information regarding BTC’s widespread adoption as the legal tender in India.

DeFi protocols have seen a huge surge in the number of exploits, and the study by Elliptic shows that it has topped $12 billion this year.