Incident Overview
Deus Finance was exploited due to a logic flaw in the $DEI token contract. The attacker drained pools on both Arbitrum and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) chains resulting in a loss of 6,227,977 $USD.
DEI is a stablecoin of Deus Finance which lost its dollar peg on the previous hack. On May 5th, 2023 Deus Finance's $DEI token was exploited due to a logic flaw related to burn issue that allowed an attacker to drain DEI/USD and DEI/USDC pools on both Arbitrum and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) chains. The attacker performed zero-amount burns and received $DEI tokens for nothing, which was consequently swapped for valuable stablecoins. On BSC chain alone roughly 1,336,814 $USD was lost. The stolen funds were transferred through several EOA addresses and then swapped for $DAI. And 4,891,163 $USD were drained from the Arbitrum chain and swapped for 2,529 $ETH, which remain at the same address.
The attack resulted in a total loss of approximately 6,227,977 $USD worth of crypto assets from both chains combined.
Attacker initial address in BSC: https://bscscan.com/address/0x08e80ecb…98f599
Funds holder address in BSC: https://bscscan.com/address/0xdf610228…9cb465
Malicious transaction in Binance Smart Chain: https://bscscan.com/tx/0xde2c8718…a190c3
Attacker initial address in the Arbitrum chain: https://arbiscan.io/address/0x189cf534…b122d1
Malicious transaction in the Arbitrum chain: https://arbiscan.io/tx/0xb1141785…3c37ef
Incident Report
Protocol Information
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.
What Auditors Should Check
If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to DEUS Finance, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (May 2023).
- Verify all logic paths related to Burn Function Mistake / Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation
- 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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