Ankr Crypto Protocol Exploit Lost $15 Million

October 2022 is the month with the most number of crypto hacks.

On December 2, 2022, An anonymous group of hackers drained around $15 million in liquidity from BNB Chain-based staking platform Helio after exploiting an oracle issue with the platform’s on-chain data.

Oracles are third-party services that collect outsourced data from several other blockchains. Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols use oracles to ensure their lending, borrowing, and other services are accurate.

Helio exploitation update came into the limelight an hour after the DeFi platform Ankr was attacked, and around $5 million were stolen from the DeFi platform. According to the report, the attackers were able to mint six quadrillion aBNBc tokens, and after minting, the attackers changed them into five million USDC stablecoins.

Moreover, it is difficult to predict whether the same group of hackers operated the attacks.

According to Blockchain data on Friday morning, the Helio attacker acquired around 183K aBNBc tokens using 10 BNB and further delayed oracle data on Helio, then allowed the attacker to borrow a sum of $16 million of HAY stablecoins.

Nowadays, crypto attacks and hacks are quite common, and as per reliable reports, November 2022 is the month in which most crypto attacks occur.

Earlier on November 1, 2022, peak shield published its data regarding crypto hacks. It was noted that around $3 billion was looted in October, double the total amount in 2021.

The largest digital asset hacks occurred in October, and the second largest occurred in March 2022, with $710 million in stolen funds. Most of which resulted in the exploitation of the Ronin Bridge, amounting to $625 million.

According to PeckShield data, the biggest hack occurred in October 2022, with the BNB chain causing a loss of about $586 million.

On October 12, Mango Markets stated that it had experienced a hack because a hacker had influenced an oracle price and swiped liquidity. Almost $100 million seems to have been swiped in the hack.

What happened was a self-funded economic exploit with the hacker filling up an account with almost $5.5 million USDC. They then utilised this to drop out an everlasting futures contract for the MNGO token and traded against it.

On October 2, 2022, A Twitter post from Transit Swap’s official account created an environment of turmoil among investors. The notification was regarding a hack in the Transit Swap Ecosystem of around $ 23 million U.S dollars.