Hackers Steal Crypto worth $180 million from Beanstalk Farms

Recently it has been reported that hackers have attacked Beanstalk Farms, decentralized finance (De-Fi) project, and stolen nearly $180 million in the form of cryptocurrency. The Verge informed that Beanstalk operates a system in which participants earn rewards by contributing funds to a central funding pool. This Central funding tool is used to balance the value of one token at close to $1. Beanstalk Farms in a tweet said, "Beanstalk suffered an exploit. The Beanstalk Farms team is investigating the attack and will make an announcement to the community as soon as possible." The hackers targeted Beanstalk's majority vote governance system which is a core feature of many DeFi protocols. Blockchain analytics company PeckShield was the first to notice the cyberattack.

The Beanstalk attacker "used a flash loan obtained through the decentralized protocol Aave to borrow close to $1 billion in cryptocurrency assets and exchanged these for enough beans to gain a 67 percent voting stake in the project". The report further states that the attacker then instantly repaid the flash loan, netting an $80 million profit. Also, earlier in January this year, hackers stole crypto tokens from the Blockchain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) platform BadgerDAO, worth $120 million. Several crypto wallets were left empty before the platform could stop the cyber attack.