Incident Overview
On July 19, 2024, Rho Markets, a DeFi lending protocol on the Scroll blockchain, was exploited for $7.5 million in Ether due to an oracle manipulation attack.
The attacker manipulated Rho Markets’ oracle, which provides offchain price data to the protocol’s smart contracts, allowing them to withdraw far more Ether than the collateral they posted. This oracle manipulation targeted a known rounding error vulnerability common to Compound forks, a flaw previously exploited in attacks on Hundred Finance and Raft Finance. As a result, $7.5 million in Ether was drained, wiping out all of Rho Markets’ USDT and USDC reserves.
The funds remained in the attacker’s wallet at the time of reporting.
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 Rho Markets, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (July 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Price Oracle Manipulation / Oracle Issue are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Oracle Manipulation & Price Manipulation attack class for patterns
- Audit oracle price feeds for manipulation risks - ensure time-weighted average prices (TWAPs) or multi-source aggregators are used, not spot prices
- 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.
Free TrialRelated Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
- 01
- 02
Learn to Prevent the Next Rho Markets
The Rho Markets hack is one of many attacks that skilled auditors are trained to detect before deployment. Master real exploit patterns and defense techniques with hands-on Web3 security training.