Squid moved quickly to confirm that the recent $3 million exploit targeted a third-party Gnosis Safe module called the SquidRouterModule, and not the underlying cross-chain routing contracts, after draining 86 wallets on Ethereum and Base in less than two hours.
summary
- Blockaid has flagged an active exploit on SquidRouterModule affecting 86 Gnosis Safes
- About $3 million to $3.2 million was stolen and converted into DAI via Uniswap
- The vulnerability was a persistent series of Message Security checks that were reused by attackers
- Squid says its main 0xce16F router contract and user funds are not affected
According to the chain security company SiegeThe attack centered on a Gnosis Safe module called SquidRouterModule deployed on Ethereum and Base, which was used by some multisig owners to route cross-chain transactions involving Squid and other protocols.
Blockaid reported that over the course of about two hours, the attacker stole funds from 86 Gnosis Safe wallets, with total losses ranging from about $3 million to $3.2 million, before merging the proceeds into a single address containing just over 3.07 million DAI.
In a detailed summary, KuCoin News Desk cites Blockaid and Squid saying that the stolen tokens were swapped into DAI via a custom Uniswap V3 pool created by the attacker, who then pooled the depleted funds into a single wallet to simplify the money laundering process.
The fundamental flaw was located within the SquidRouterModule’s “message security” logic: Binance Square’s coverage explains that the module simply accepted a static string provided by the caller as proof that the message was valid, meaning anyone who could see the contract code could copy the string and pass along the random call data.
CoinNess reports that the attacker exploited the verification of the public static chain to execute arbitrary calls from affected Vaults, effectively give themselves permission to transfer assets from multiple tags without the owner’s confirmation.
How did SquidRouterModule exploit drain 86 Gnosis Safes?
The Binance incident note describes it bluntly, saying that the design “accepted a fixed chain provided by the caller for message security,” a pattern that eliminated any real authentication and opened a direct path to draining funds from integrated wallets.
This is a known risk category for Gnosis Safe modules, as previous research by OpenZeppelin has shown that any attached module can execute transactions from the wallet without the owner’s consent if its internal checks are weak or misconfigured.
In this case, the insecure module was labeled Squid but was developed and deployed by a third-party integrator, not by the Squid team or its underlying protocol maintainers.
Why would Squid keep its primary router away from being hacked?
In an official X post, Squid It stated that “this incident has nothing to do with Squid’s core protocol and contracts,” and stressed that its main routing contract, identified on-chain as 0xce16F69375520ab01377ce7B88f5BA8C48F8D666, “was not involved in any of the malicious transactions.”
KuCoin’s write-up notes that Squid clarified that the SquidRouterModule “was not developed, published, or operated by them; the name was independently chosen by a third party when integrating with Squid,” and that it falls completely outside of the core router architecture.
The team also stressed that user funds, existing approvals, and protocol-level integrations remain secure, and that “underlying routing across the Squid chain is not affected,” as it continues to monitor the situation and coordinate with security companies.
The optics are bad, though: as the KuCoin article points out, headlines inevitably associate “Squid” with “hack,” even though the blast radius is limited to a dingy Safe module whose only real connection to the project is the branding and its use of Squid as one of several integrated routers.
Security researchers have long warned that the power of Gnosis Safe comes with the caveat that any module connected to the vault can execute transactions without the owner’s confirmations if its logic is flawed, which is exactly what happened here once the static chain check was bypassed.
For the broader cross-chain and wallet ecosystem, the SquidRouterModule incident is another concrete example of how compositing combined with slow security assumptions in edge modules can open up entire attack surfaces outside of contracts and protocol audits.
It also highlights a painful reality for infrastructure teams like Squid, which Axelar describes as “a protocol that enables cross-chain liquidity routing and swapping through a single SDK”: Even when your contracts are intact, third-party wrappers can still drag your brand into exploit headlines if you fail basic security hygiene.
