Not less than 12 DeFi protocols and crypto companies have been attacked in simply over two weeks because the $280 million Drift Protocol exploit on April 1.
Assaults geared toward crypto protocols or corporations because the begin of April embody CoW Swap, Hyperbridge, Bybit, Dango, Silo Finance, BSC TMM, Aethir, MONA, Zerion and, most lately, Rhea Finance and the Grinex trade.
The Drift Protocol was hit with one of many largest exploits this 12 months on April 1, dropping round $280 million in a long-running social engineering assault suspected to contain North Korean-affiliated actors.
The assaults additionally come amid rising considerations this month that advancing AI fashions, corresponding to Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and equivalent fashions, might finally make it even simpler for cyberattackers sooner or later.
Rhea Finance exploited for $7.6 million
DeFi protocol Rhea Finance reported on Thursday that an attacker “leveraged a vulnerability in Rhea’s Margin Buying and selling characteristic to execute a coordinated pool manipulation assault,” impacting the Rhea Lend good contract.
Round $7.6 million was extracted, according to blockchain safety agency CertiK.
“The attacker created pretend token contracts and added liquidity in contemporary swimming pools, seemingly deceptive the oracle and validation layer,” it defined.
In the meantime, the Russia-linked Grinex trade suspended operations after a $13.7 million hack on Thursday, blaming “unfriendly states” for the incursion.
Associated: Stablecoin issuer Circle faces lawsuit over $280M Drift Protocol hack
One other assault this month was aimed on the Binance Sensible Chain TMM/USDT liquidity pool, which suffered a reserve manipulation assault, ensuing within the lack of round $1.67 million in early April, R3ACH Community analyst Jussy said on Thursday.
It adopted simply days after bridge aggregator Dango misplaced $410,000 from a wise contract bug on April 13.
In the identical month, lending protocol Silo Finance misplaced $392,000 on April 3 from a misconfigured oracle exploit and decentralized GPU cloud computing platform Aethir misplaced $423,000 in an entry management exploit on April 9.
DPRK ups AI social engineering assaults
The Drift Protocol and Zerion pockets exploits had been two examples of Democratic Folks’s Republic of Korea-affiliated teams utilizing AI and social engineering to infiltrate crypto corporations to steal credentials and funds.
Malicious actors pilfered over $168.6 million in cryptocurrency from 34 DeFi protocols within the first quarter of 2026, in line with knowledge from DefiLlama.
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