North Korean Hackers Attack Drift Protocol In USD 285 Million Heist
Contents
North Korean Hackers Attack Drift Protocol In USD 285 Million Heist
Key takeaways
- On April 1, 2026, attackers drained approximately USD 285 million in user assets from Drift Protocol — the largest decentralized perpetual futures exchange on Solana — in roughly 12 minutes, with most stolen funds bridged to Ethereum within hours.
- On-chain staging began on March 11, nearly three weeks before the April 1 execution — with attacker infrastructure, token manufacturing, and social engineering all running in parallel with careful coordination.
- The critical vulnerability was not a smart contract bug but a combination of social engineering multisig signers into pre-signing hidden authorizations and a zero-timelock Security Council migration that eliminated the protocol's last line of defense.
- The attacker manufactured an entirely fictitious asset — CarbonVote Token — with a few thousand dollars in seeded liquidity and wash trading, and Drift's oracles treated it as legitimate collateral worth hundreds of millions …
Key takeaways
- On April 1, 2026, attackers drained approximately USD 285 million in user assets from Drift Protocol — the largest decentralized perpetual futures exchange on Solana — in roughly 12 minutes, with most stolen funds bridged to Ethereum within hours.
- On-chain staging began on March 11, nearly three weeks before the April 1 execution — with attacker infrastructure, token manufacturing, and social engineering all running in parallel with careful coordination.
- The critical vulnerability was not a smart contract bug but a combination of social engineering multisig signers into pre-signing hidden authorizations and a zero-timelock Security Council migration that eliminated the protocol's last line of defense.
- The attacker manufactured an entirely fictitious asset — CarbonVote Token — with a few thousand dollars in seeded liquidity and wash trading, and Drift's oracles treated it as legitimate collateral worth hundreds of millions …