Hacker returns 93.1% of funds stolen from Moola Market

A hacker has returned 93.1% of the funds stolen after an $8.4 million exploit on Celo-based lending protocol Moola Market on Tuesday.

The attack led to the draining of 8.8 million CELO tokens, 1.8 million MOO tokens, 765,000 cEUR and 644,000 cUSD. The refunded funds add up to $7.8 million, going by the total heist that saw the protocol pause its activities

“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,” the Moola Market team tweeted hours after the incident.

Hacker keeps ‘negotiated’ bounty

According to an update Moola Market published earlier today, the attacker is keeping part of the loot as bounty, with this amounting to just over $500,000.

Moola Market has pledged a detailed update over the incident, with plans on how to safely resume operations also shared then. Meantime, the team sees the recovery of a majority of the funds as a good start for the community – especially as this means that impact on users will be minimal.

The exploit on Moola started at around 4:04pm UTC on 18 October 2022, with the attacker launching their malicious plan by first manipulating the price of Moola Market’s native token MOO.

This happened on the decentralised exchange platform Ubeswap, where the hacker proceeded to borrow huge amounts the cUSD, cEUR, and CELO tokens leveraging MOO as collateral and succeeded in draining the protocol.

The attack is the latest in a string that sees October on pace to be the worst month in 2022, with over $718 million stolen by last week. According to a recent Chainalysis report, more than $3 billion has already been lost to hackers in 2022, most of it from DeFi platforms.