Moola Markets Has Been Robbed With $9M Attackers Returned 93% Funds

Attackers manipulated the prices of MOO tokens, which touched an all-time high.

Moola Market got back 93.1% of funds, the remaining amount kept by Attackers as Bug Bounty.

Blockchains and their use cases are quite popular nowadays, but in the last few months, scammers and hackers have been continuously stealing funds from several blockchains.

Recently on 18 October 2022, Hackers attacked Celo blockchain-based decentralized finance (Defi) lending protocol, Moola Market.

The information came into the limelight when the official Twitter handle of Moola Market tweeted about the hack in the blockchain. And the platform added that it has halted all its activities and is working to trace down the hack that occurred.

We are actively investigating an incident on @Moola_Market. All activity on Moola has been paused. Please do not trade mTokens.
To the exploiter, we have contacted law enforcement and taken steps to make it difficult to liquidate the funds. We are willing to negotiate a…
— Moola Market 🐮 (@Moola_Market) October 18, 2022

A Web3 security company Hacken reported that attackers manipulated the prices of low-liquidity native MOO tokens by initially buying approximately $45,000 worth and depositing it as collateral to borrow CELO.

🚨 @Moola_Market protocol in the Celo (@CeloOrg) Ecosystem was exploited for $9.1 millions almost 5 hours ago
Here are the details of exploit:
…
— Hacken🇺🇦 (@hackenclub) October 18, 2022

The borrowed CELO and further CELOs supplied by the hackers were used as collateral to borrow more MOO, helping to hike the token’s prices. The hackers kept repeating this until the price of the MOO token inflated by 6,400%.

With the hiked token price, the hackers were capable to borrow $6.6 million worth of CELO, $1.2 million of MOO, along with $740,000 of Cello Euros (cEUR) and $644,000 Celo Dollars (cUSD), all worth multiples more than their initial posted collateral which resulted in the loss of around $9.1 Million to Moola Market.

After five hours after the attack once again, Moola Market tweeted and informed that the protocol had received only 93% of exploited funds back, and the rest seven percent were kept by Attackers as a bug bounty.

Following today’s incident, 93.1% of funds have been returned to the Moola governance multi-sig. We have continued to pause all activity on Moola, and will follow up with the community about next steps, and to safely restart operations of the Moola protocol. (1/2) https://t.co/UsdN44X70X
— Moola Market 🐮 (@Moola_Market) October 18, 2022

The bug bounty, which attackers keep, is around $ 50,000.

According to data from CoinMarketCap, while framing this article, the native token of Moola Market,MOO token is trading at $0.02169. And after analyzing the graph, it is seen how the attackers pumped the prices of MOO tokens.

The all-time high of MOO tokens is $3.59, which is the manipulated price of MOO tokens that the attackers pumped on 18 October 2022 to attack the blockchain.

Recently 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 utilized this to drop out an everlasting futures contract for the MNGO token and traded against it.

This influenced the value of MNGO higher, permitting the hacker to swipe up Mango treasury loans and take the liquidity before it collapsed.

Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while his post-graduation. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing along with being a developer. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing