Hacked Grim Finance’s Auditors Blame New Analyst For Missing the Issue
Ad Disclosure
We believe in full transparency with our readers. Some of our content includes affiliate links, and we may earn a commission through these partnerships.
Auditors of the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Grim Finance, which was exploited for USD 30m worth of digital assets on Sunday, claim that a new analyst had conducted the protocol’s audit while their Chief Technology Officer (CTO) was on vacation.
On December 19, Grim Finance informed users that the project was exploited by an external hacker. “The attacker attacked using the function titled beforeDeposit() from our vault strategy entering a malicious token contract,” the team detailed.
Hello Grim Community,
— Grim Finance (@FinanceGrim) December 19, 2021
It is with heavy hearts that we inform you that our platform was exploited today by an external attacker roughly 6 hours ago. The attackers address has been identified with over 30 million dollars worth of theft here https://t.co/qA3iBTSepb
Approximately four months ago, Grim Finance was audited by Solidity Finance, a smart contract auditing service. The service said that the issue slipped through their auditing process as they were overwhelmed by the number of projects and busy onboarding new analysts.
“When conducting the Grim Finance audit ~4 months ago, our firm was experiencing rapid growth and hiring. This audit was performed by an analyst who was new to the team & while our CTO was on vacation; and unfortunately this issue was not caught in our peer review process,” Solidity Finance said.
According to Rugdoc.io, a DeFi watchdog, the Grim Finance hacker used a reentrancy attack, faking additional deposits into a vault while an initial transaction was still going. This way, they managed to withdraw more funds than they had truly deposited into the vault.
2) A before-after pattern is a section of code that checks the vault balance before and after your deposit to figure out how much was actually received by the vault. This helps with transfer-tax tokens where the amount sent does not equal the amount received.
— Rugdoc.io (@RugDocIO) December 18, 2021
Rugdoc.io also criticized Grim Finance over its weak security measures, suggesting that the project should have used a reentrancy guard, which can prevent more than one function from being executed at a time by locking the contract.
“Hopefully all projects can draw lessons from this incident that there is much knowledge most experienced solidity devs have at hand,” Rugdoc.io tweeted. “If you haven’t acquired this yet, don’t build multi-million dollar projects. Don’t get audits from companies which everyone knows are useless.”
Following the hack, the Grim Finance team said that the vaults have been paused “to prevent any future funds from being placed at risk” and recommended users withdraw their funds as all of the vaults and deposited funds are at risk.
“We have contacted and notified Circle (USDC), DAI, and AnySwap regarding the attacker address to potentially freeze any further fund transfers,” the team said.
Meanwhile, the project’s native token GRIM plunged by 81.2% at the early hours of the hack, falling from nearly USD 0.8 to USD 0.15, according to CoinGecko. At 10:07 UTC, the coin is up 3.3% over the past 24 hours, and down 55% over the past week, trading at USD 0.25.
____
Learn more:
– Crypto Security in 2022: Prepare for More DeFi Hacks, Exchange Outages, and Noob Mistakes
– What Did We Learn from the MonoX Hack?
– Hacked Vulcan Forged Says It Has Refunded ‘the Majority’ of Affected Users
– Hacked AscendEX to Reimburse Users, Says ‘Relatively Small Percentage’ Impacted
– Hacked Bitmart to Compensate Crypto Traders After USD 200M Loss
– Badger DAO Appears to Have Lost Over USD 120M in an Attack
- Trump Appoints PayPal Veteran David Sacks as ‘White House AI and Crypto Czar’
- Brad Garlinghouse Calls Out 60 Minutes for Excluding Key XRP Ruling in Latest Crypto Feature
- US Senate to Vote on Crypto Skeptic SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw’s Renomination
- What’s Happening In Crypto Today? Daily Crypto News Digest
- XRP Price Targets $5 as Whales Load Up – Is Another Surge Coming?