Thetanuts Finance, the DeFi options protocol, confirmed that it suffered an exploit that drained $2.1 million from an old vault linked to it.
According to Thetanuts, the hacked contract has been deprecated for years.
Blockchain security company Peak Shield Alertwhich reported the incident before Thetanuts confirmed the exploit, reported that $2 million in tokens appeared to have been recovered through Whitehat’s efforts.
The remaining funds, about $105,000 in USDC, were exchanged by the exploiter for approximately 60 ETH, according to PeckShieldAlert’s on-chain analysis. The attacker also holds $34,000 in options tokens denominated in USDC.
What led to the old Thetanuts Finance vault being exploited?
A vulnerability in the vault’s recovery logic is the root of the exploit, according to him Security Researcher ExVulwho posted a detail on X.
Thetanuts Finance responded within hours, Write on X“Our initial investigations indicate that this is again an abandoned basement from which we migrated years ago.”
“It has no connection to any of our existing contracts or products,” Protocol states, adding that it will publish a full post-mortem once more details are gathered.
Blockaid exploit detection system It also independently picked up the attack, issuing a community alert indicating active exploitation of the Thetanuts nodes on Ethereum. The security platform also shared the address of the exploiter and the address of the exploited contract as well.
Are deprecated protocols under attack?
The Thetanuts incident adds to a growing list of deprecated protocols that have come under attack recently.
The latest, apart from Thetanuts, is Aztec Connecta privacy bridge that has been abandoned since 2023, lost $2.1 million due to a separate verification flaw in its immutable smart contracts, according to Cryptopolitan. In this case, the team gave up all management keys, leaving no one able to debug or pause the code.
So far in June, the total value of the hack in terms of DeFi vulnerabilities has exceeded $46 million, and it’s only halfway through the month. At that pace, it could rival or exceed May, which saw its fair share of protocol violations.
Thetanuts has tried to reassure its users with its existing contracts that they are not in danger; However, recent events have made it clear to users that abandoned code is not a safe code, and neither are the funds associated with them.
