WEB3-BNB-CHAIN-2022

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.

On April 14, 2025 the perpetuals DEX KiloEx lost about $7.5 million across BNB Chain, Base, opBNB, and Taiko to what was reported as oracle price manipulation but was really an access-control failure. KiloEx's price feed (KiloPriceFeed.setPrices) was meant to be reachable only through a keeper-gated call chain, but the top-level MinimalForwarder.execute function was publicly callable and validated an attacker-supplied signature against attacker-supplied data, letting anyone forge a trusted call that reached setPrices and write an arbitrary price. The attacker set a market price far below true value, opened a leveraged position, then set the price far above value and closed it in the same flow, extracting fabricated profit from the vault; the sequence was repeated across all four chains, with a single transaction netting $3.12M. Reporting that framed it as flash-loan oracle manipulation was imprecise: no market liquidity was moved, the price was simply written directly through the unprotected forwarder. After KiloEx offered a 10% (~$750K) whitehat bounty and no legal action, the attacker returned essentially all of the funds by April 18, 2025.

On February 21, 2025, Bybit lost roughly $1.5 billion (about 401,347 ETH plus stETH/mETH) in the largest crypto hack to date. The root cause was a supply-chain/front-end compromise: a breached Safe{Wallet} developer machine let attackers inject malicious JavaScript into the Safe UI served from Safe's S3-backed app.safe.global front end. The code was scoped to activate only for Bybit's cold-wallet Safe (and one other contract), so when the three signers reviewed a routine cold-to-hot transfer the UI showed legitimate data while their Ledgers were sent a different payload. Signers blind-signed a delegatecall (operation=1) to an attacker contract that, executing in the proxy's storage context, overwrote storage slot 0 (the masterCopy/singleton pointer) with an attacker-controlled implementation, after which sweep functions drained the wallet. The FBI and TRM Labs attributed the theft to North Korea's Lazarus Group (TraderTraitor/APT38); funds were rapidly laundered and not recovered.

On October 16, 2024, the cross-chain lending protocol Radiant Capital lost roughly $50M (about $53M across Arbitrum and BSC) after attackers compromised the devices of at least three of its multisig signers. Initial access began September 11, 2024 via a Telegram message spoofing a trusted former contractor, delivering a ZIP with a decoy PDF that was actually a macOS application carrying INLETDRIFT backdoor malware. The malware sat between the signers' browsers and their hardware wallets, so the Safe (Gnosis) UI and Tenderly simulations displayed correct data while the signers blind-signed a malicious transferOwnership() call on the LendingPoolAddressesProvider contract; the 3-of-11 threshold was met and the attacker then upgraded the pools to a malicious implementation and drained them. Mandiant assessed with high confidence the attack was conducted by North Korea-linked UNC4736 (aka Citrine Sleet/AppleJeus), part of the Lazarus cluster. Funds were not recovered and the protocol later wound down.

Blind signing, approving a payload the wallet cannot decode, is the final step behind the largest multisig drains: Radiant Capital lost about $50M in October 2024 and Bybit about $1.5B in February 2025, both via hardware-wallet signers approving transactions whose true effect their devices could not render. In the Radiant attack, malware showed legitimate-looking transaction data in the Gnosis Safe front-end while the hardware wallets actually received and signed a Safe execTransaction whose inner operation was a delegatecall to an attacker contract; that delegatecall executed in the Safe's own storage context and overwrote the implementation/owner state, handing control to the attacker. Because a hardware wallet's small display can only show a four-byte selector and raw hex, signers cannot parse a nested execTransaction or distinguish a benign call from a delegatecall that rewrites storage slot zero. The same root cause applies to legacy eth_sign, which signs an arbitrary 32-byte hash with no context, letting a phishing site obtain a signature reusable as a transaction authorization. The signer sees one intent and authorizes a different one.

Gasless permit signatures are now the dominant phishing vector: Scam Sniffer found Permit-type signatures accounted for 56.7% of 2024 wallet-drainer attacks within $494M of total losses, with cases like an October 13, 2024 Permit2 phish that drained roughly $1.39M of PEPE, MSTR and APU from one victim. EIP-2612 adds a permit(owner, spender, value, nonce, deadline, v, r, s) function so an owner signs an off-chain EIP-712 Permit struct that sets an ERC-20 allowance; the standard explicitly allows any address to submit it on-chain. The phishing dApp prompts that off-chain signature with the attacker as spender and value set to the full balance or type(uint256).max; the victim never sends a transaction or pays gas, and the wallet often shows an opaque typed-data blob. The attacker then submits permit() to register the allowance and immediately calls transferFrom to sweep the tokens. Uniswap's Permit2 generalizes this to every ERC-20: a single PermitSingle/PermitTransferFrom signature authorizes the attacker as spender, and because Permit2 defaults to the entire balance, one careless signature empties the wallet.