Hackers Steal $7.2M From Another DeFi Protocol On Binance Smart Chain

A flash loan attack on Binance Smart Chain’s BurgerSwap led to over $7 million being stolen from the DeFi protocol.

What Happened: BurgerSwap, a decentralized automated market maker built on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), was subject to a flash loan attack earlier today, which resulted in a significant loss of funds.

Through a series of 14 transactions, exploiters managed to steal a total of $7.2 million from the protocol.

BurgerSwap just experienced Flash Loan attack.

We have suspended Swap and BURGER generation to avoid further loss.

Our tech team is working on the issue and will publish the solution later.

More details will be published soon. Thanks for your patience.

— BurgerSwap (@burger_swap) May 28, 2021

The protocol’s native token BURGER dropped 18% in value after the BurgerSwap team confirmed the exploit in an announcement and temporarily suspended Swap and token generation on the platform.

According to on-chain researcher Igor Igamberdiev, “the exploit happened because the attacker could do re-entrance and did a second swap before reserves, which are used to calculate the number of tokens in swaps, were updated.”

Igamberdiev also shared a snapshot of block explorer Etherscan, which revealed that the stolen funds were being sold and withdrawn to Ethereum via the Nerve Bridge.

Why It Matters: Although DeFi protocols that facilitate token swaps are a major part of the ecosystem, exploits are unfortunately not an uncommon occurrence.

Last week, another BSC project PancakeBunny was exploited for $45 million, which resulted in the price of BUNNY tokens crashing from $150 down to $20.

Since May, the total losses on Binance Smart Chain due to flash loans and other attacks have exceeded $157 million, according to a report from Colin Wu.

See also: Bitfinex Hacker Moves Around $7.5B Worth Of Stolen Bitcoin Amidst Coinbase Listing

Following the massive uptick in illicit activity on Binance Smart Chain, crypto intelligence firm CipherTrace announced support for the blockchain and said the integration would give onlookers the tools to identify any suspicious on-chain activity. 

“In the long run, this will gain BSC more credibility and partnerships in the fiat and regulated space,” said Binance Chief Compliance Officer Samuel Lim.