Defi protocol CoW swap faced a hack attack, lost $180k

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The decentralised exchange aggregator CoW Swap lost more than $180,000 worth of crypto fund in a recent hack attack. 

CoW Swap is a special kind of Defi aggregator, which finds the lowest prices from all decentralised exchanges (DeFi) and DEX aggregators. In short, CoW swap saves for Crypto traders with p2p trading and protection from MEV. 

On 7 Feb 2023, Popular Crypto analytic & security platform Peckshield reported that the CoW swap’ GPv2 settlement contract was tricked by a hacker 10 days ago and now finally the hacker successfully stole 551 BNB coins (approximately $181k). That hacker transferred the stolen funds to the Ethereum crypto Token mixing platform Tornado Cash.

On the same day, the CoW Swap team also responded to this incident and confirmed that its users don’t need to revoke any approval because a hacker or any other person can’t access the users’ funds without any approval from user sign-in. 

To fight against this hack attack, the CoW swap team immediately revoked all approvals for the affected contract and further introduced a new contract without arbitrary execution code functionality.

The CoW swap team also reassured its users that they don’t need to take tension because their funds were never at risk because CoW Swap does not hold customers’ funds.

Defi & safety 

In the last couple of years, Defi protocols surged rapidly in the crypto sector because of the increasing demand of the decentralised platforms and new use cases with crypto assets. 

Alongwith the inflow of huge numbers of Defi crypto projects in the crypto market, the inflow of hackers also surged. Over a couple of years, the majority of the hackers in the crypto market targeted Defi platforms. 

Read also: Revolut starts crypto staking for customers in UK and EEA