On May 20, unknown persons seized control over the control mechanism of the Tornado Cash Ethereum mixer. According to Paradigm analyst samczsun, attackers have already begun to withdraw TORN tokens from smart contracts of the protocol.
On 2023/05/20 at 07:25:11 UTC, Tornado Cash governance effectively ceased to exist. Through a malicious proposal, an attacker granted themselves 1,200,000 votes. As this is more than the ~700,000 legitimate votes, they now have full control.https://t.co/nY87XmrYgT pic.twitter.com/h9qjc3xRqz
— @samczsun.com (@samczsun) May 20, 2023
According to the expert, unknown people introduced a malicious proposal, the code of which provided the ability to call the function emergency stop to update logic after acceptance. With its help, unknown people appropriated 1.2 million votes.
Hackers were able to revoke blocked tokens, transfer assets to the managing smart contract, and stop the router.
The analyst emphasized that attackers cannot withdraw cryptocurrency from separate pools. However, they have already begun to “merge” the blocked votes.
Locked votes have been drained https://t.co/MJbKKyFII2 pic.twitter.com/DyJnDwc3SZ
— @samczsun.com (@samczsun) May 21, 2023
PeckShield specialists noted that the hackers exchanged most of the withdrawn tokens for Ethereum and sent the cryptocurrency to the Tornado Cash address. Part of the assets was transferred to the Bitrue platform.
#PeckshieldAlert Tornado Cash Governance Exploiter has deposited 6K $TORN to #bitrue. And swapped ~380K $TORN for $ETH and then transferred 372 $ETH into Tornado Cashhttps://t.co/3fEa1kYFaz pic.twitter.com/BzqagupO5c
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) May 21, 2023
According to Cointelegraph, the Tornado Cash community is trying to roll out a proposal that would allow the changes to be rolled back. However, users were advised to withdraw assets from the application’s smart contracts.
Members DAO also noted that the Binance exchange has “more tokens than the attackers,” so it could theoretically help remedy the situation.
Binance, in turn, announced the suspension of deposits in TORN.
Due to circumstances surrounding the protocol, #Binance will temporarily pause $TORN deposits until further notice.
— Binance (@binance) May 21, 2023
According to CoinGecko, against the backdrop of negative news, TORN quotes fell by 25%. At the time of writing, the token is trading near $4.7.
Recall that in August 2022, Tornado Cash came under US sanctions. In the same month, Dutch authorities arrested Alexey Pertsev, the developer of the service.
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