Incident Overview
May 30, 2025 – Malda (formerly Mendi Finance) suffered a ~$273K exploit on the Linea network due to a compromised contract. All contracts were paused, and the team is investigating.
A malicious actor gained control over a vulnerable Malda smart contract on the Linea network, stealing ~$273K in assets including USDC, WETH, weETH, wrsETH, ezETH, and WBTC. The attacker swapped the funds to ETH, bridged them to Ethereum via Stargate Finance, and laundered them through Tornado Cash. Mendi contracts were unaffected, and Malda remains paused during the investigation.
A 10% white-hat bounty was offered for voluntary fund return.
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 Malda (prev. Mendi Finance), these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (May 2025).
- Verify all logic paths related to 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
Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.
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