Beanstalk Farms loses $182M in crypto after cyberattack

Decentralized finance project Beanstalk Farms had nearly $182 million of cryptocurrency stolen following an attack on its majority vote governance system, reports The Verge. Blockchain analytics firm PeckShield identified the attack on Sunday and estimated that the attacker earned almost $80 million in net profits for the attack. Beanstalk has been found to be impacted by a flash loan attack. Flash loans are a DeFi product that enables the borrowing of substantial cryptocurrency values for a short period of time in an effort to offer liquidity. The attacker leveraged the Aave decentralized protocol to secure a flash loan for nearly $1 billion, which was exchanged for a 67% voting stake in Beanstalk, allowing code execution to facilitate asset transfers to their wallet, an analysis from CertiK showed. "We are seeing an increasing trend in flash loan attacks this year. These attacks further emphasize the importance of a security audit, and also being educated about the pitfalls of security issues when writing Web3 code," said CertiK co-founder and CEO Ronghui Gu.