Two DeFi lending protocols suffered damages of 84 billion won due to price manipulation attacks

The decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocols Tectonic and Moonwell were exploited in a scheme to manipulate the prices of illiquid tokens, resulting in a total loss of over $84 million. On the Cronos blockchain, Tectonic was targeted when an attacker repeatedly deposited and borrowed TONIC tokens as collateral, causing the price to spike within minutes. Security firm GoPlus estimates that the manipulated collateral value reached a peak of $37.5 million, leading to the withdrawal of approximately $75 million in liquid assets, including USDT. Approximately $6 million worth of Ethereum had already been bridged and swapped for around 2,600 ETH. Cronos halted block production to prevent further damage. Three days prior, on August 27th, the MAMO market on the Base chain, Moonwell, was also attacked. The attacker accumulated over 94 million MAMO tokens using $1.95 million in USDC, then transferred 53 million of them directly to the collateral contract, artificially inflating the value of the underlying asset by approximately 3.7 times per share. This allowed them to borrow and withdraw approximately $11 million in cbBTC and WETH. While liquidation was initiated, approximately $9.1 million in outstanding debt remains. This method is structurally identical to the Mango Markets incident in October 2022, where Abraham Eisenberg manipulated the price of MNGO, increasing it by over 13 times in just 30 minutes and stealing over $110 million. Despite the CFTC and SEC treating that incident as the first case of oracle manipulation regulation, the repetition of the same vulnerability is a warning sign for the market.