CREAM Lending Hack

TOTAL LOST $18.8M
High Flashloan Reentrancy Attack ethereum

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain ethereum Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #241 By amount stolen
Auditors 1 Prior security audit

Incident Overview

Money markets, liquid staking and protocol-to-protocol lending

This is classified as a Flash Loans Attacks, Reentrancy . Compare similar hacks →

Incident Report

Protocol / Project CREAM Lending
Date of Incident
Affected Chain(s) ethereum
Attack Technique Flashloan Reentrancy Attack
Classification Ecosystem
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Lending
Smart Contract Language Solidity
Official Website cream.finance/
Protocol Twitter/X @CreamdotFinance

What the Attacker Needed to Succeed

Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.

Technical Knowledge Deep understanding of flashloan reentrancy attack and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with ethereum smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in CREAM Lending's contract logic - root cause: ecosystem
Execution Speed Precise transaction ordering and timing to exploit the vulnerability within a single atomic block
Obfuscation Plan A strategy to launder and move stolen funds - typically through mixers, cross-chain bridges, or decentralized DEX swaps to resist tracing

What Auditors Should Check

Could this have been caught in audit? Yes — skilled auditors routinely flag Flashloan Reentrancy Attack vulnerabilities in code review
Audited by Audit Report 1 — still lost $18.8M. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to CREAM Lending, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (August 2021).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Flashloan Reentrancy Attack are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Flash Loans Attacks attack class for patterns
  • Check that all state-changing functions follow the Checks-Effects-Interactions (CEI) pattern to prevent reentrancy and logic ordering bugs
  • Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs

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Security Audit History

Related Attack Classes

The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:

See all Flash Loans Attacks examples →

Flash Loans Attacks Reentrancy

Sources & References

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