Olympus DAO’s vulnerability leads to an attack

Leading DeFi protocol Olympus decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) has become the latest in the list to be attacked among many hacks that occurred in the past few months. Olympus DAO faced a massive crypto cyberattack, as a hacker made off with a large amount of its native token OHM—early on Friday. Though later, the alleged thief was an ethical security hacker, as they returned stolen funds to the DAO. 

The platform alerted community members about the exploit early Friday morning on Discord by stating:

“This morning, an exploit occurred through which the attacker was able to withdraw roughly 30K OHM (worth around $300K) from the OHM bond contract at Bond Protocol. This bug was not found by three auditors, nor by our internal code review, nor reported via our ImmuneFi bug bounty.”

As a security firm Peckshield reads, 30,437 OHM tokens (almost $300,000) were stolen from the DeFi protocol at 1:22 a.m. ET today. This major hack was a result of a bug in the network’s smart contract system on the Ethereum blockchain.

Bug in Olympus

The “BondFixedExpiryTeller” contract, which is used to run open bonds programmed in the Olympus DAO’s fundamental cryptocurrency OHM tokens, was hacked by malware. The hacker was able to enter his preferred input value as fund and deceive the network by stealing $300K because the contract failed to make a validation input in the “redeem () function.”

“We have closed the affected markets and all other funds are safe,” Olympus further states.

The crypto sector has faced the side affects of this bearish market by losing nearly $1.37 trillion worth of assets from the market since January 2022. In contrast, crypto assets held by DAO witnessed an immense growth of over 8% since the beginning of this year. 

Nearly $710 million was added to the DAO sector in the last nine months though its nature of decentralization was recently questioned by Carolyn Wilkins while speaking at the University College London’s Blockchain Research Center.