Incident Overview
On June 13, 2024, UwU Lend, a decentralized lending protocol, suffered its second exploit within a week, losing approximately $3.7 million. This follows a $20 million flash loan attack on June 10, which exploited price oracle manipulation tied to the sUSDe stablecoin. Despite the team’s claim that the vulnerability was patched after the first incident, the same attacker executed today’s exploit, once again leveraging flash loans to drain funds.
The attacker manipulated oracles through a flash loan, a common technique in DeFi exploits where large temporary loans are used to distort prices, enabling under-collateralized borrowing or over-valuation of assets. In this case, the target was the sUSDe market, indicating that the previous fix may have been incomplete or the attacker found a related vulnerability. After today’s attack, the stolen funds were converted into ETH and remain in the attacker’s wallet.
UwU Lend, founded by Michael Patryn (aka Omar Dhanani / 0xSifu) — a controversial figure tied to the QuadrigaCX collapse — has yet to officially comment on this second breach.
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 UwU Lend, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (June 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Flashloan Price Oracle Attack / Flash Loan Attack are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Flash Loans Attacks 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
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