Deus Finance was exploited for the second time in just two months. The attacker was able to gain more than $13.4 million worth of cryptocurrency on Thursday. This was made public by security researchers at PeckShield via Twitter.
The @DeusDao was exploited today in https://t.co/USKNHhXeid with ~$13.4M gain for the hacker (The protocol loss may be larger).
— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) April 28, 2022
The attack used a flash loan to trick the way Deus' smart contracts read data on the platform's liquidity pools. This enabled the attacker to artificially inflate the value of some assets. The attacker then went ahead and borrowed funds and repayed them again, which allowed to make profits.
Blockchain data shows that around $143 million were borrowed as a flash loan, which resulted in $13.4 million profit for the hacker. PeckShield noted that the total losses to the protocol could be much higher.
This exploit was the second in just two months on the protocol, which was attacked in a similar way back in March for $3 million.