Curve Finance warns users after website and X account hacks
Top decentralized exchange Curve Finance has warned users to avoid its curve.fi website due to an ongoing DNS hijacking attack, which redirects users to a malicious wallet drainer.
Last week, Curve’s X account was hacked to promote a phishing website, another common scam facing crypto users.
Approximately two hours after the initial alert, Curve confirmed that curve.fi “points to a malicious site which can drain your wallet!” Co-founder Michael Egorov steered users towards the platform’s other front-end, curve.finance, in the meantime.
A later update confirmed that “the protocol itself remains fully operational and secure.”
Read more: Compound Finance and Celer Network websites compromised in ‘front-end’ attacks
According to decentralized finance (DeFi) dashboard DeFiLlama, Curve is the sector’s fourth-largest exchange, active on nine blockchains and with a total value locked (TVL) of around $2 billion.
Front-end attacks are just one of multiple dangers facing DeFi users. Hackers don’t directly target a project’s underlying liquidity pools, oracles or other smart contracts.
Instead, they aim to trick individual users who believe they are interacting with a legitimate website into signing malicious transactions.
Many of DeFi’s most well-known projects have been targeted by this attack vector in the past, including 2021’s “approvals harvesting” heist of Badger DAO users, which netted attackers $120 million, including 896 bitcoins (BTC) — worth around $40 million at the time — from now-defunct Celsius.
In fact, this isn’t even Curve’s first tangle with front-end hijacking. In 2022, the curve.fi site was also spoofed, leading to around $570,000 of losses from unfortunate users.
The DNS registrar named-and-shamed in the wake of the first incident, iwantmyname, was again called out publicly by Curve, which says its “response time is totally unsacceptable [sic].”
The decision to remain with the registrar appears to be down to limitations related to the .fi domain, and that Curve intends to phase it out.
Read more: Abandoned DeFi websites used to host crypto wallet drainers
Curve balls
Curve has faced plenty of trials and tribulations since its launch in 2020’s so-called “DeFi Summer.” Even the Curve DAO itself was yeeted into existence by anonymous user 0xc4ad who claimed to have found the governance contracts “ready to rock” and decided to deploy them themself.
Last year, Egorov’s heavily leveraged CRV positions were hit with a liquidation cascade, sending the token’s price plummeting.
The positions had been in limbo ever since the hack, which hit some of the exchange’s liquidity pools for around $70 million in the summer of 2023.
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