Drift Protocol suffers losses of about $280 million from a new type of attack, and management control is taken over

Gate News, April 2, Drift Protocol issued a statement saying that earlier, a malicious actor used a new type of attack involving durable nonces to gain unauthorized access, quickly taking over administrative control of Drift’s Security Committee. The attack method is highly complex; the attacker spent weeks preparing, using durable-nonce accounts to pre-sign transactions in order to enable delayed execution. Current investigations show that this incident was not caused by a bug in the Drift program or smart contract, and there is no evidence indicating that the mnemonic phrase was stolen. The attacker is suspected to have obtained access through unauthorized or forged transaction approvals, which may involve social engineering tactics. The attack resulted in approximately $280 million in protocol funds being withdrawn. All lending funds, vault deposits, and trading funds were affected. DSOL (the portion not deposited in Drift, including assets staked to Drift validators) and insurance fund assets are not affected; the latter is currently being withdrawn for protection. As a precautionary measure, Drift has frozen all remaining protocol functions and updated the multisig to remove the compromised wallet.