Delta Prime, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, has fallen victim to a cyber attack, resulting in the loss of nearly $6 million worth of crypto assets.
This incident is the latest in a series of cybersecurity breaches affecting the crypto space in recent weeks.
Initially, the platform experienced a loss of approximately $4.5 million, as reported by the on-chain security platform Cyvers.
In a post on X earlier today, Cyvers stated, "Suspicious address already swapped USDC to ETH! Total estimated loss is around $4.5M so far!"
However, the attack did not stop there. According to Cyvers, the root cause of the hack appeared to be the admin losing control of the private key, allowing the attackers to continue draining the pools. The breach expanded further with a series of malicious transactions, increasing the total stolen amount to nearly $6 million.
This attack is particularly concerning because it highlights the vulnerability of DeFi platforms to private key exploits, a weakness that cybercriminals have increasingly targeted.
According to Meir Dolev, CTO of Cyvers, the primary cause of the breach was a private key exploit. In a conversation on Telegram, he explained:
“Hacker took control of the wallet which is the admin of Delta Prime proxy contacts, later on, upgraded these contracts to point to his malicious contract that enabled the hacker to drain Delta Prime pools on Arbitrum chain.”
Dolev further disclosed,
"[The] total loss is $5.9 million.”
Notably, this attack strategy is becoming more common in the DeFi sector, as hackers often target the private keys controlling administrative functions to gain unauthorized access to platforms.
Meanwhile, Delta Prime's hack incident happens to come at a time when hacks in the crypto industry have seen a sudden rise. Just in the past weeks alone, several major hacks have been reported.
Amongst them is the WazirX hack which occurred back in July resulting in a loss of more than $200 million. More recently, Indonesian exchange Indodax also fell victim to a hack resulting in a $15 million to $22 million loss.
