Orion Protocol Post Mortem Details $3M DeFi Exploit

Orion Protocol is the latest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol to suffer an exploit this year. On-chain sleuths have just released the post-mortem of the attack.

Orion Protocol was the victim of a reentrancy exploit on Feb. 2, resulting in the loss of around $3 million in ETH.

Furthermore, Orion CEO Alexey Koloskov clarified that the damage was contained to an internal broker account and that user funds remained safe.

Over the weekend, Rekt published a post-mortem of the attack, one of the largest of the year so far in terms of losses. It summarized the DeFi incursion

“The attacker used manipulated swaps of flash loaned stablecoins, artificially depositing the assets twice before withdrawing the inflated balance.”

By creating and using a fake token (ATK), the exploiter was then able to double their balance before making off with the stolen loot.

On Feb. 5, Orion’s co-founder said he was happy no users were affected by the attack.

Orion Protocol is a liquidity aggregator that aims to bring CEX liquidity to various blockchain networks.

DeFi Exploits Down YoY

There have already been several high-profile DeFi exploits already this year. The LendHub DeFi lending and borrowing protocol lost $6 million on Jan. 12. Furthermore, Thoreum Finance and Midas Capital were also exploited last month, according to DeFiYield’s Rekt database.

However, according to PeckShield, January’s numbers are down on the same period last year.

The blockchain security firm reported that crypto exploits in January were 93% lower than the $121 million lost to exploits in January 2022. Last month only saw a total of $8.8 million lost to various exploits and attacks on the sector.

On Feb. 4, Orion posted an update stating that it had addressed several issues, such as bug fixes and interface changes. Rekt concluded that the $3 million loss has “motivated Orion to take a more controlled approach.”

ORN Price Outlook

The Orion native token ORN was not really affected by the exploit. At the time of press, it was trading at $0.964 following a 3.6% loss on the day.

Additionally, ORN was trading at just over a dollar before the attack last week. The DeFi asset has gained around 25% over the past month, in line with most other cryptos.

However, ORN remains a painful 96.7% down from its all-time high of $29.25 in March 2021.

ORN/USDT Chart by TradingView

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