In short
- CoW Swap, an Ethereum-based decentralized exchange aggregator, warned users not to join its scheme after suffering from a front.
- Although the amount of losses is not known, one cybersecurity researcher estimates that $500,000 has been taken from unsuspecting users so far.
- CoW Swap said the attack did not affect the protocol’s smart contracts, but the exchange’s integration was halted as a precaution.
CoW Swap, and Ethereum– fixed central exchange aggregator, warned users on Tuesday not to use the protocol, revealing that its front-end interface had been compromised.
“Now we are working hard to solve this problem,” the project that is often used by the founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin said post for X. “The CoW Protocol backend and APIs are not affected, but we have temporarily disabled them as a precaution.”
The CoW Swap showed that attackers gained control over a website that users often visit before participating in the protocol. This gave malicious actors the opportunity to direct users to other sites where money could be stolen by accepting malicious transfers.
Although the compromise did not affect the CoW Swap smart contracts, the process appeared to have stabilized three hours after the attack was revealed. Meanwhile, users on Discord reported that it was lost within the project’s official server.
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” said one user who said he lost more than $50,000 through the CoW Swap hack. I have no money.
While it was disappointing, the extent of the losses was not immediately known.
A fake member of the CoW Swap community who goes by MooKeeper said Decrypt that reports are promptly investigated and verified. They added that the full review will be released tomorrow or later this week.
“We have evidence that a small number of users have signed malicious certificates for very small amounts of money,” MooKeeper said.
However, a well-known cybersecurity researcher who goes by Vladimir S. on X he said that approximately $500,000 worth of digital assets “have been removed from multiple addresses to date.”
Martin Köppelmann, co-founder and CEO of Gnosis, which is the founder and head of the public sector. post to X that the number of attacks seems less. He added that users could only be affected if they agreed to interact with CoW Swap within the last few hours.
Websites that try to scam users by pretending to be established DeFi projects are nothing new. Last year, for example, Curve Finance he suffered Its second DNS hijack. The first, which took place in 2022, cost $570,000 to users.
Buterin, who has swapped a lot of Ethereum and stablecoins using CoW Swap this year, was involved in the process as recently as last week, according to data from analytics firm Arkham Intelligence. showed. In 2024, they also used the money transfer method download carrying the currency of a baby hippopotamus meme from Thailand.
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