WEB3-HARMONY-HORIZON-2022

On July 18, 2024 Indian exchange WazirX lost approximately $230M (about $234.9M) from a Safe (Gnosis) 4-of-6 multisig wallet held under a custody arrangement with Liminal (five WazirX keys plus one Liminal key). The attack was a blind-signing exploit: signers reviewed benign transaction details in the manipulated Liminal interface while the payload actually signed differed, authorizing a delegatecall (function selector 0x804e1f0a) that overwrote slot0 of the Safe proxy and repointed its implementation to an attacker-controlled contract (0xef279c2ab14960aa319008cbea384b9f8ac35fc6). Once the proxy pointed to attacker logic the wallet was fully controlled without further keys, and it was drained. The theft was attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group, later confirmed in a joint statement by the US, South Korea and Japan in January 2025. Funds were laundered via Tornado Cash; victims are being repaid through a court-approved restructuring (resumed October 2025, BitGo custody) rather than direct recovery.

On May 31, 2024 Japanese exchange DMM Bitcoin lost 4,502.9 BTC, worth approximately $305M-$308M at the time. The compromise was a supply-chain social-engineering chain that did not breach DMM directly: a TraderTraitor operator posing as a recruiter on LinkedIn sent an employee of wallet-software vendor Ginco a malicious Python script disguised as a GitHub pre-employment coding test. The malware (RN Loader / RN Stealer) harvested SSH keys, credentials and cloud configurations; weeks later attackers used stolen session cookies to impersonate the Ginco employee, access the unencrypted communications system linked to DMM, and tamper with a legitimate withdrawal request submitted by a DMM employee, redirecting 4,502.9 BTC to attacker addresses. US and Japanese authorities (FBI, DC3, Japan's NPA) attributed the theft to North Korean actors tracked as TraderTraitor (Jade Sleet / UNC4899), associated with the Lazarus Group. Funds were not recovered; DMM Bitcoin shut down and transferred accounts to SBI VC Trade.

Between February 9 and 12, 2024, the South Korean crypto gaming and NFT platform PlayDapp was exploited twice for about $290M after a privileged-key compromise. Around January 16, 2024 the attacker spear-phished the PLA token deployer with a domain-spoofed email whose attachment installed a remote-access tool, giving control of the deployer's machine and its private key. PLA used a custom MinterRole/Ownable mint-permission pattern, so the attacker called addMinter(address) (method ID 0x983b2d56) on the PLA contract (0x3a4f40631a4f906c2BaD353Ed06De7A5D3fCb430) to authorize their own address as an authorized minter, then minted over 200 million PLA (~$36.5M) on February 9 and a further 1.59 billion PLA (~$253.9M) on February 12. PlayDapp's $1M return offer was ignored; PLA trading was suspended and exchanges worked to freeze funds, with most of the inflated supply effectively unsellable due to thin liquidity.

On March 13, 2023 Euler Finance, an Ethereum DeFi lending protocol, was drained of roughly $197M across DAI, wBTC, stETH and USDC. The root cause was a missing health check in the donateToReserves function, which let a user transfer eTokens to the protocol's reserves without any solvency verification. Funded by a ~$30M Aave flash loan, the attacker used Euler's leveraged minting (up to ~19x) to build a position of roughly 410M eDAI against 390M dDAI, then called donateToReserves to push the account into bad debt (insolvency) on purpose. They then self-liquidated through a second address; Euler's soft-liquidation logic applied a steep discount that grew with account unhealthiness, paying the liquidator far more collateral than the outstanding debt, which produced the profit after the flash loan was repaid. The attacker, identifying as 'Jacob', subsequently returned essentially all of the stolen funds, with Euler confirming full recovery in early April 2023.

Signature replay occurs when a signed message lacks binding context (nonce, chainId, or an EIP-712 domain separator), so a signature valid for one execution can be re-submitted on another call or another EVM chain. The canonical 2022 case is the Optimism/Wintermute loss of 20,000,000 OP tokens disclosed June 9, 2022: Wintermute provided a Gnosis Safe address deployed on Ethereum mainnet but not on Optimism. Because the Gnosis Safe factory's original deployment transaction used a pre-EIP-155 signature, its hash covered only six RLP fields (nonce, gasPrice, gas, to, value, data) and omitted chainId, so anyone could rebroadcast the identical signed transaction on Optimism. An attacker replayed that deployment to recreate the factory and Safe at the same counterfactual address on L2, gained control of the contract account before the rightful owners, and swept the 20M OP. The same low-level flaw appears in application contracts that ecrecover a digest missing nonce/chainId, letting one signed approval be replayed repeatedly.

A frontend hijack leaves the on-chain contracts untouched but replaces the Web2 surface serving the dApp UI with a wallet-drainer clone, so no Solidity audit can catch it. The recurring pattern: attackers take over the domain registrar or DNS provider account (or a CDN/tag-manager account), repoint the domain to a cloned site, and prompt visitors to sign malicious token approvals, EIP-2612 permit signatures, or transfers. Curve Finance was hit twice: on August 9-10, 2022 its curve.fi domain was DNS-hijacked via a compromised nameserver and drained ~$570K in USDC/DAI; and again around May 12, 2025 at the registrar level, after which Curve permanently migrated to curve.finance and announced an ENS move (Convex Finance and Resupply, which depend on Curve's data feeds, suffered dependency-driven outages but were not themselves compromised). In July 2024 a mass wave hit DeFi domains registered through Squarespace, whose forced migration off Google Domains stripped 2FA: Compound's frontend redirected to an Inferno Drainer clone and 100+ protocols were exposed (Celer blocked its takeover via domain monitoring). Ambient Finance's domain was hijacked through stolen registrar credentials on October 17, 2024. Most recently, on April 14, 2026 attackers used forged identity documents to social-engineer the registrar into handing over DNS control of CoW Swap's swap.cow.fi and cow.fi domains, redirecting users to a pixel-perfect drainer clone for about 90 minutes; over $1M was taken in roughly three hours, including 219 ETH (~$750K) from a single wallet, while CoW's contracts, backend APIs, and solver network were untouched. The same bucket includes CDN-account injections (KyberSwap's September 2022 Cloudflare/Google Tag Manager compromise, ~$265K) and BGP route hijacks that swap signed bundles for drainer code.