On August 14th, 2022, decentralized finance network Acala got under a digital attack. During the attack, the hacker entered the ecosystem and started minting tonnes of its native stablecoin aUSD. After minting, hackers even converted the minted crypto assets for different other cryptocurrencies. The team behind the project responded quickly and restricted the protocol from further damage. Still, the damage was done and Acala lost nearly 3 billion aUSD in total.
Following the attack, Acala network team started tailing out the attack and put efforts to bring back the stolen assets. The efforts appeared to show fruitful results where the network reported to recover approx 3 billion aUSD.
On August 15th, 2022, Acala network successfully recovered about 1.29 billion stolen aUSD in its first effort. Later on in its second attempt on August 17th, the protocol managed to recover stolen funds, which accounts for 1.68 aUSD this time. This is how the overall recovered assets totals for nearly 3 billion aUSD.
Initial investigations brought the misconfiguration issue as the reason behind the exploit of the Acala network. Primarily the issue was with the liquidity pool of iBTC/aUSD. The pool was to enable users to mint as much as aUSD as they want. Attacker took advantage of the issue with the liquidity pool and brought it to this end. Soon after the attack, the price of native stablecoin aUSD, started declining and it even went to 0.01 USD.
In its further investigation, Polkadot based defi hub noted that the 1.68 billion aUSD existed on the 16 different addresses that were identified in addition to other tokens. These other assets were inverse synthetic Bitcoin (iBTC),liquid staking DOT (LDOT), Polkadot (DOT) and Acala (ACA).
Acala said that it will continuously unveil the trace reports in upcoming times. This way, the community will get the help and support to create such proposals needed to counter the situation. Additionally, defi protocol also said to release other reports.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/08/19/how-significant-recovery-of-acalas-stolen-3-billion-ausd/