• CoW Swap, a decentralized exchange (DEX), has been the victim of a recent DeFi exploit, with the hacker stealing over $180,000 worth of crypto.
• The hacker exploited the smart contract in the “solvers competition” of CoW Swap.
• Despite the exploit, CoW Swap says neither the protocol nor its users suffered any loss as no funds were stolen from the protocol.

DeFi Hacker Steals Over $180K Worth Crypto from CoW Swap DEX

CoW Swap is a decentralized exchange (DEX) that recently became victim to an exploit where a hacker managed to steal over $180,000 worth of crypto. The hack was first spotted by on-chain sleuth MevRefund and confirmed by CoW Swap team after which they noted that none of its users were affected as no funds were taken from the protocol itself.

Exploiting ‚Solvers Competition‘

The hacker exploited a smart contract within CoW Swap’s „solvers competition“ which allows external parties to compete to find best execution route for their users. Reports suggest that the hacker entered this competition 10 days ago and used it to transfer funds from settlement contracts containing seven days‘ worth of protocol fees.

Hacker Consolidates Funds into Two Wallets

Nansen reported that roughly $180,000 was stolen by the exploiter who later consolidated these funds into two wallets containing DAI ($123K), BNB ($50K) and ETH ($7.4K). Despite such hefty losses incurred by this hack, CoW Swap maintained that solver’s bond will pay for all damages which means that no direct loss was suffered by them due to this hack.

Safeguard Measures Taken By CoWSwap

In order to prevent such malicious activities in future, CoWSwap has taken some additional security measures like implementing mandatory deposit limits on all accounts and introducing significant delay between transactions done through their platform in order to ensure proper auditing before allowing any transaction taking place on their network.

Conclusion:

To conclude we can say that even though hackers are getting increasingly sophisticated when it comes to exploiting DeFi protocols like CowSwap but still there are various measures available at our disposal which can help us mitigate risks associated with such malicious activities like introducing deposit limits or transaction delays which can help us stay one step ahead of hackers and keep our assets safe from being misappropriated.