Mango Market Loan Attack
Mango Markets — a cryptocurrency trading platform — was robbed of more than $100 million on Tuesday night after a hacker used a flash loan attack to exploit the platform. The attack is one of a series of recent high-profile thefts from platforms that have sent shockwaves through the industry.
Flash loan attacks involve hackers borrowing funds that do not require collateral, buying a significant amount of a cryptocurrency to artificially raise its price and then offloading the coins. The loan is paid back and the borrower keeps any profit.
Mango Markets took to Twitter Tuesday evening to tell users that it was investigating an incident “where a hacker was able to drain funds from Mango via… price manipulation.”
The company said it was disabling deposits and asking third parties to freeze the stolen funds. It also offered the hacker a bug bounty for the return of the funds.
We will be disabling deposits on the front end as a precaution, and will keep you updated as the situation evolves.
Hacker returns nearly $19 million stolen on Transit Swap DeFi platform
Several hours later, the company confirmed that the hacker used two accounts to artificially raise the price of the MNGO coin by as much as five to ten times the original price on various exchanges in only a few minutes.
By manipulating the price of the coin, the hacker was able to borrow and withdraw Bitcoin, several U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins and more cryptocurrency from Mango’s platform.
“The net value extracted by the account was around $100 million equivalent at the time,” the company wrote.
Ronghui Gu, CEO of blockchain security company CertiK and a Columbia University professor, told The Record that during the flash loan attack Mango’s token grew in price from $0.038 to a peak of $0.91, allowing the hacker to borrow heavily against it.
After the coin reached its peak, more than 2000% higher than before, Gu said the attacker used previously purchased MNGO coins as collateral to borrow more than $54 million in USDC; more than $25 million in mSOL; approximately $23 million in SOL; and $5 million in Bitcoin, among other cryptocurrencies.
Mango Market Loan Attack
