Phished Founder, Liquidated Thief

Click here to lose $13 million.

A Venus Protocol whale just learned the hard way that Zoom calls can cost more than your mortgage.

One malicious video client, one perfectly timed signature, and $13 million vanished faster than a rug pull announcement.

But here's the twist - Venus didn't just watch their user get drained and shrug.

They killed their own protocol, summoned an emergency vote, and pulled off DeFi's most controversial rescue mission in under 12 hours.

What started as a textbook phishing attack became a masterclass in whether decentralized protocols can have their cake and eat it too.

When saving a whale means revealing your protocol's hidden kill switch, who's really getting rescued?

September 2nd, 9:05 AM UTC. A Venus Protocol whale fires up their Zoom client for another day of DeFi business.

Except that innocent-looking video software had been quietly compromised, giving attackers backdoor access to their entire machine.

Why hack code when you can hack trust?

The victim signed a delegate approval transaction - the kind of routine permission that happens thousands of times daily across DeFi.

Protocols managing your positions without touching private keys. Your average degen signs these faster than they read Terms of Service.

Click. Sign. Rekt.

Six seconds between signature and financial annihilation.

One compromised video client just handed administrative control of a $13 million wallet to whoever was patient enough to wait for the right moment.

Most phishing stories end here - whale gets rekt, attacker disappears, Twitter dunks on the victim for a week.

But this thief had bigger plans than a simple smash-and-grab.

What happens when stealing millions isn't enough?

The Heist

09:05:36 UTC. Six seconds after our whale signed their crypto suicide note, the attacker unleashed a flash loan masterpiece.

Exploit Transaction: 0x4216f924ceec9f45ff7ffdfdad0cea71239603ce3c22056a9f09054581836286

Venus Protocol's post-incident analysis breaks down the attacker’s playbook:

Step one: Flash borrow 285.72 BTCB - because why use your own money when DeFi lets you borrow millions with zero collateral?

Step two: Clear the victim's existing debt with the borrowed funds, plus an extra 21 BTCB from the attacker's pocket. Generous? More like accountant-level cruelty.

Step three: Delegate powers activate. Transfer the victim's entire digital treasure chest - $19.8M in vUSDT, $7.15M in vUSDC, 285 BTCB, plus a shopping list of other tokens. All perfectly legal according to that innocent signature from 6 seconds ago.

Step four: The masterstroke. Use those freshly stolen assets as collateral to borrow $7.14M USDC against the victim's remaining BNB. Not only did they drain the wallet - they made the victim pay for their own mugging.

Step five: Borrow enough BTCB to repay the flash loan. Transaction complete, attacker invisible.

One atomic transaction. One empty whale. One very satisfied crypto thief who just converted someone else's life savings into their personal collateral playground.

Except greed has a funny way of turning hunters into prey.

When does a perfect heist become a suicide mission?

The Response

09:09 UTC. Four minutes after the digital bank robbery, Hexagate and Hypernative's monitoring systems started screaming.

Not your typical "suspicious transaction detected" alert.

This was a five-alarm fire with a $13 million price tag, and the security firms knew exactly who to call.

Venus Protocol's response? Nuclear option activated.

Twenty minutes from heist to protocol pause. Venus pulled their own kill switch, freezing every core function across their entire ecosystem.

Borrowing? Stopped. Withdrawals? Dead. Liquidations? Suspended.

One user gets phished, the entire protocol goes dark.

This wasn't just damage control - it was financial warfare.

Venus deliberately kneecapped their own platform to trap the attacker's stolen goods.

Every single vToken the hacker held suddenly became worthless paper, locked behind Venus's emergency powers.

But freezing a DeFi protocol to save one whale? That's the kind of decision that requires more than just dev team consensus.

Time for democracy's greatest hits: the emergency governance vote.

Can you really call it decentralized when the community has twelve hours to decide if centralization is worth saving one user's fortune?

Lightning Democracy

Venus didn't just pause their protocol - they called an emergency town hall that would make any Web2 crisis team jealous.

"Lightning Vote" they called it.

Because nothing says grassroots governance like cramming a multi-million dollar decision into a few hours of frantic Discord debates.

The proposal was beautifully simple:

Phase 1: Partial restoration (let users save themselves from liquidation). Phase 2: Force-liquidate the attacker's position. Phase 3: Full security review to prevent replication.
Phase 4: Resume Venus fully.

The community's response? 100% unanimous approval.

Not 99%. Not 98%.

Every single vote aligned behind Venus's master plan like some kind of DeFi North Korea election result.

Maybe it was genuine consensus. Maybe it was self-preservation.

Or maybe when your protocol is bleeding millions while competitors circle like vultures, dissent becomes a luxury nobody can afford.

By afternoon, Venus had their mandate.

Time to execute the most controversial liquidation in DeFi history - one that would require overriding their own smart contracts to seize an attacker's collateral.

The victim signed one bad transaction. Venus was about to sign democracy's death certificate.

What happens when "code is law" meets emergency powers?

The Recovery

21:36 UTC. Twelve hours after the heist, Venus executed their counter-strike.

Remember how the attacker got greedy? Using stolen funds as collateral was about to become the world's most expensive mistake.

One transaction. Multiple commands. Maximum controversy.

Liquidations: ON. Seizure: COMPLETE. Liquidations: OFF.

Venus just performed surgery on a live blockchain. Enable the kill switch, grab everything not nailed down, and disappear the evidence.

The attacker's masterstroke became their death sentence. All that stolen collateral sitting pretty in Venus pools?

Suddenly fair game for the protocol's newly activated "emergency liquidation" powers.

Greed is a hell of a drug. Steal millions, use them as collateral, get liquidated by your own stolen funds.

21:58 UTC. Lights back on. Funds recovered. Crisis averted.

Except nobody's talking about the $13 million anymore. They're talking about the 12 hours Venus spent proving that decentralization is just a marketing slogan.

Turns out your unstoppable DeFi protocol has a very stoppable emergency brake - and they're not afraid to use it when things get expensive.

When the revolution needs a king to survive, who's really getting overthrown?

The Victim Speaks

"It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it."

That's the Twitter bio of Kuan Sun, founder of Eureka Crypto and our $13 million victim.

Well, speaking of doubt - he wrote a detailed recap explaining exactly how he got fooled.

Venus Protocol confirmed he was the one that was phished as well.

The social engineering was diabolical.

Attackers had been planning this since April, when they compromised a "Stack Asia BD" contact he'd met at a Hong Kong conference.

Months of patient grooming, building trust through a familiar-but-not-too-familiar acquaintance. The malicious Zoom client had already given them machine access.

During the fake meeting: "Your microphone isn't working, please upgrade." Another layer of deception while they worked behind the scenes.

Later, Chrome crashes unexpectedly. "Restore tabs?" Click.

Somehow, his trusted Rabby wallet extension had been swapped with a fake version that stripped away all security warnings.

Venus withdrawal, just like he'd done thousands of times before.

Except this time, no risk warnings, no simulation preview, no safety checks. The compromised frontend made a delegate approval look like a routine transaction.

Hardware wallet didn't matter. Rabby's security features didn't matter. When the frontend is poisoned, even the most paranoid security setup becomes a false sense of safety.

The kicker? According to the victim’s recollection, it was allegedly done by Lazarus Group - North Korea's elite hacking unit that's been terrorizing crypto for years.

Our victim didn't just get phished by some rookie; he got taken down by state-sponsored digital warfare specialists who probably have this routine down to a science.

Now he's grateful to Venus Protocol, PeckShield, SlowMist, Chaos Labs, Hexagate, HyperactiveLabs, Binance, and others, who helped recover his funds.

A happy ending, thanks to a protocol willing to break its own rules when the stakes got personal.

When the world's most sophisticated hackers can fool hardware wallets and security-conscious users, is anyone actually safe in DeFi?

Venus saved the whale and killed the dream in the same transaction.

Twelve hours of coordinated chaos proved that every "decentralized" protocol keeps a centralized panic button hidden behind governance theater.

Sure, the community voted - but when 100% consensus happens faster than a Discord argument about gas fees, you're witnessing democracy's greatest magic trick: making authoritarianism look like a group decision.

The attacker walked away empty-handed, the whale got their fortune back, and Venus proved they're willing to override their own code when the numbers get uncomfortable.

Mission accomplished, reputation obliterated.

The real tragedy isn't that someone fell for a Zoom phishing scam - it's that we're still pretending protocols with emergency override powers are somehow fundamentally different from the traditional finance system they claim to replace.

If decentralization dies the moment it becomes inconvenient, was it ever really alive?

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Пожертвование (ETH / ERC20): 0x3C5c2F4bCeC51a36494682f91Dbc6cA7c63B514C

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