The DeFi project 79thVault, operating on the BNB Chain, suffered a loss of approximately $12.5 million following suspicious activity involving its 79AU token. Analysts at GoPlus Security identified that an attacker gained access to a privileged function within the 79AU contract, allowing the withdrawal of 2.01 million tokens from the liquidity pool.
The stolen tokens were exchanged for 16,249 BNB, valued at $12.5 million. Monitoring services noted seven unauthorized transactions ranging from 10,000 to 500,000 79AU. The contract lacked multisig or timelock mechanisms for managing the OPERATOR_ROLE, which was used to execute the transfers. Furthermore, the contract source code remains unverified on BscScan.
Following the incident, the attacker consolidated the funds, with approximately 14,395 BNB worth $11 million held on one address and 30 BNB transferred to the KuCoin exchange. The 79thVault team has since revoked the operator privileges and announced a system upgrade, though they have not issued a formal comment regarding the breach or the extent of the losses.
The project attempted to contact the attacker via an on-chain message, offering a 10% bounty for the return of the funds. Experts from GoPlus Security suggest that the incident may have resulted from a compromised private key or an insider threat, noting that the message to the attacker originated from the same address used to execute the exploit.
