Benzinga - Tornado Cash, a service that enables users to obfuscate cryptocurrency transactions, fell prey to a hostile takeover by hackers through a malicious governance proposal.
What Happened: Security researcher Samczsun from Paradigm, a crypto investment firm, on Sunday revealed that the attacker manipulated the governance mechanism, gaining over 1.2 million fraudulent votes, surpassing the 700,000 legitimate ones.
On 2023/05/20 at 07:25:11 UTC, Tornado Cash governance effectively ceased to exist. Through a malicious proposal, an attacker granted themselves 1,200,000 votes. As this is more than the ~700,000 legitimate votes, they now have full control.https://t.co/nY87XmrYgT pic.twitter.com/h9qjc3xRqz— @samczsun.com (@samczsun) May 20, 2023
This exploit gave the perpetrator complete control over the governance functions of Tornado Cash.
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Why It Matters: A Tornado Cash community member Tornadosaurus-Hex said, "The attacker posted a new proposal to restore the state of governance," adding that there is a “good chance” that the attacker would execute it.
Tornado Cash token (TORN) was up 7% soon after the proposal surfaced.
It is expected that the attacker will revert their TORN tokens back to zero, effectively relinquishing the control that they previously had over the governance votes.
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