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Monthly Security Review: May 2024

June 1, 2024
4 min read

Security at a Glance ๐Ÿ‘€

DeFi Exploits

  • Gala Game

On May 20, the private key of a Gala administrator was stolen, and the attacker minted 5 billion GALA tokens, exchanging them for $21M worth of tokens on the blockchain. Subsequent to this, an official report from Gala indicated that the breach involved a third-party contractor and that internal procedures have since been rectified, including the removal of unauthorized users. Following an investigation into internal leads, the attacker's identity was confirmed, and the stolen assets were fully returned.

Official report: Gala News

For project teams, establishing a necessary monitoring system for privileged operations is crucial. Inadequate management of private keys poses severe risks of internal and external attacks gaining admin privileges or access to private keys. In this example, employing Phalcon could have helped avoid losses.

  • Sonne Finance Incident

On May 14, Sonne Finance on Optimism was exploited, resulting in a loss exceeding $20 million. The root cause was a precision loss in Compound V2. Although the Sonne team was aware of this issue and planned to add liquidity during market deployment to avoid the issue, the attacker exploited a flaw. Multiple scheduled transactions in the timelock were left for anyone to execute, and the attacker executed the market deployment without adding liquidity, completing the exploit.

If the Sonne had used Phalcon, they would have detected the attack sooner and limited the loss to $3 million instead of $20 million. Learn more

  • TCH

On May 17, TSC was attacked on the BSC network, suffering losses exceeding $11K due to a signature replay issue. Developers should be aware of at least three types of Signature Malleability:

Due to the characteristics of ECDSA, if (r, s, v) is valid, then (r, secp256k1n-s, 55-v) is also valid, as Ethereumโ€™s ecrecover allows both. To address this, the OpenZeppelin signature library restricts s to be less than secp256k1n/2+1. (OpenZeppelin Contracts)

Regarding the value of v, 0 and 27 mean the same, as do 1 and 28, with 27 being a coding standard. Some libraries convert 0 and 1 to 27 and 28 before verification, but OpenZeppelin currently only supports 27 and 28.

OpenZeppelin previously supported two types of byte signatures, one with v as a separate byte following s, and another with v in the high order of s. (Malleable Signatures)

  • TonUP

A project on the TON chain, TonUP, announced that its staking contract was hacked, planning to allocate funds to buy back 307,264 tokens to compensate users. As new ecosystems bring new opportunities, they also come with the threat of hacks.

๐Ÿซก The attack transactions, root causes, and PoC of major attacks in May are all recorded in our Security Incidents list for your review.

Phishing

  • Pink Drainer

The Pink Drainer announced its closure, claiming to have made enough and planning to retire. However, exiting the scene might not be as straightforward as they anticipate.

  • Whale's Address Poisoning Attack

On May 3, a whale suffered an address poisoning attack, losing 1,155 WBTC worth around $70 million. Fortunately, the attacker returned the funds after persistent community efforts. Phishing attacks involve social engineering and can target even the most DeFi experts. Stay vigilant!

Legal Action

On May 15, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest of two brothers for attacking the Ethereum blockchain and stealing $25 million in cryptocurrency. These attackers exploited vulnerabilities in the Flashbot Relay to attack MEV bots. This was a highly sophisticated attack, and our in-depth analysis is available here.

Read the DOJ's press release here.

Blog Article

https://blocksec.com/blog/how-phishing-websites-bypass-wallet-security-alerts-strategies-unveiled

Phalcon Virtual Experience Journey

๐Ÿ˜Ž Ready for a LIFE-AND-DEATH battle against hackers?

https://blocksec.com/blog/phalcon-virtual-experience-join-our-free-hack-defense-game-and-block-real-attacks-with-phalcon

We invite you to participate in the "Phalcon Virtual Experience Journey" for FREE.

Battle against hackers, confront REAL on-chain attacks, and use our automated attack-blocking platform Phalcon to save millions in assets! Are you ready to be a hero?

MetaSuites now supports Solana!

MetaSuites 5.0 Major Upgrade introduces support for Solana, adds cross-site local labels, and enhances DeBank, Arkham, and Merlin Scan! Click here to learn more.

๐ŸŽ‰๐ŸŽ‰๐ŸŽ‰

We are absolutely delighted to share that our esteemed partner, DeFiHackLabs, has been awarded a 35,000 USDT grant from GCC. This funding will serve as their initial operational capital, supporting their relentless efforts in the Web3 security field and nurturing more talent.

Congratulations to DeFiHackLabs on this well-deserved recognition and here's to more groundbreaking achievements together! ๐Ÿ‘

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Bitget's $387.5M Off-Chain Breach: Beyond Keys and Contracts
Security Insights

Bitget's $387.5M Off-Chain Breach: Beyond Keys and Contracts

On September 24, 2026, attackers exploited a vulnerability in a third-party security product, obtained internal credentials, and forged withdrawal commands. The resulting transfers moved approximately $387.5M from some of Bitget's operational wallets across Ethereum, other EVM networks, XRP Ledger, Zcash, and TRON; private keys and cold wallets remained intact. This deep dive summarizes the disclosed incident path and fund flow, examines rapid conversion into native assets and the ecosystem recovery response, proposes a systematic defense-in-depth framework for institutions, and explains how authorized blockchain penetration testing can validate cross-layer assumptions.

~$11.3M Lost: Multicall Router, Nostra | BlockSec Weekly
Security Insights

~$11.3M Lost: Multicall Router, Nostra | BlockSec Weekly

This report, covering 2026/09/14 - 2026/09/20, examines two security incidents with approximately $11.3M in combined losses, on Ethereum and Starknet. In the larger one, a multicall router accepted its own address as a dispatch target, so the nested call reached the Gateway module of a Safe wallet carrying the router's own already-authorized identity instead of the external caller's, and roughly 2,900 `aEthrsETH` was routed out of that wallet into an attacker-created Uniswap v4 pool. On Starknet, Nostra's oracle integration required a minimum of only one aggregated source, so when only two of the three configured price sources reached the aggregation, a manipulated thin-pool quote averaged with a normal quote to value `NSTR` at roughly $49.52, supporting approximately $3.5M of borrowing against overvalued collateral.

~$320M Lost: Liquid Network, Symbiosis Exploits | BlockSec
Security Insights

~$320M Lost: Liquid Network, Symbiosis Exploits | BlockSec

This report, covering 2026/09/07 - 2026/09/13, examines two security incidents that caused approximately $320M in losses, including the Liquid Network exploit of 2026/09/06 that the previous report did not cover. The larger was that Liquid Network exploit, where the rangeproof validation cache in Elements derived its key by hashing four fields โ€” two of them variable in length โ€” concatenated with nothing marking the boundaries between them, so a verdict recorded for one output was returned for another whose proof was never examined, letting the attacker create 4,000 unbacked L-BTC and peg out nearly all of them as bitcoin. On the Bitcoin route of the Symbiosis cross-chain bridge, spanning BNB Smart Chain, Ethereum and Rootstock, off-chain code that reads Bitcoin deposits took the depositor's identity from a field the depositor controls and then subtracted its fee from the deposit without checking whether the fee itself was negative, letting a 330-satoshi deposit mint `46,116,860,184.27388234 syBTC`; the pools it had to be sold through held only 11.26 syBTC, so the loss to liquidity providers and users came to an estimated 9.97 BTC (~$770K).