Their CEO should serve prison time for being so incompetent but hey c-levels almost never get punished which is sad.

What kind of DeFi protocol has super power private keys to alter the protocol just like that? And no timelock. Seriously? What a joke

> The attacker used social engineering to induce Drift Security Council multisig signers into pre-signing transactions that appeared routine but carried hidden authorisations.

So much for the "Security Council". What an embarrassment to be in a team/org like that and fail your most basic duty which would be "look at what you sign".

So this is the end of the Drift project, right?

Back at the top of the crypto hype cycle I wouldn't be surprised to see a project survive even a situation like this one, but now that the hype has died down is it still possible to come back from a loss of this magnitude?

Hyperliquid.

> The funds were used to deploy CarbonVote Token (CVT), a completely fictitious asset

Crypto calling out other cryptos, made me giggle

It feels like main purpose of those various coins are scams. Either classic pump and dump, or advanced ones based on complex interactions.

this is a beautiful attack, the way that multisig signers were compromised with innocuous signatures in advance, without really compromising private keys

from the pre-funding to a virgin address, to the bundler, to the exit strategy to decentralized assets

to the protocols exposed but functioning perfectly under the stress test - props to Jupiter! - and the optional insurance protocols functioning decently, all while people point fingers at Circle for their bridge working perfectly, it's not even clear what people want them to do specifically! All of these aspects of web3 are working great, and it's easy for a cynic that only sees these headlines to miss that

inspirational, great place to build

Trusting any of these crypto protocols is hard with any serious money. If anyone wants to target you, they'll go great lengths to trick you into making a mistake. Even if you do everything right, the people behind the service can step into a mine for you. Even easier if you add AI to the pipeline where people will tend to offload the vulnerable parts of development/ops to a LLM

Is public-permissionless just a bad fundamental?

The multisig UI/UX is a real and long term difficulty for any governance council. "Please sign this opaque transaction with binary data, it represents our agreement. I promise." For a while maybe ten years ago I worked with MakerDAO on this problem - at the time the idea was a separate auditor for proposed transactions.

This general attack pattern is: get a lender with good collateral to call your bad collateral good, then swap collaterals, and it's a known and bad attack vector; the ongoing tension between innovation / speed and caution continues.

There's probably a flash-loan multiplier angle here for an even worse attack; I'm imagining chaining a liquidity change in the trusted price oracle for the CVT token in the middle of the swapping. Anyway, upshot - don't loan against North Korean attack tokens. Put it on the list.

It took a long time until we got real digital money, Bitcoin.

But all these new protocols want to do stuff at the expense of trustlesssness.