Author: Rekt News

Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Click here to lose $13 million.

A whale from Venus Protocol has just learned through a painful experience that the cost of a Zoom call can be higher than your mortgage.

A malicious video client, a perfectly timed signature, and $13 million vanished faster than a rug pull announcement.

But the twist in the story is that Venus did not just stand by and watch users get drained without taking action.

They shut down their protocol, urgently called for a vote, and completed the most controversial "rescue operation" in DeFi in less than 12 hours.

What initially seemed like a routine phishing attack ultimately evolved into a masterclass on whether decentralized protocols can "have their cake and eat it too."

When saving a whale means exposing a hidden termination switch in the protocol, who is truly saved?

Sources: Peckshield, Venus Protocol, Blocksec, Kuan Sun

September 2, 09:05 UTC. A whale from Venus Protocol launched their Zoom client, ready to start a new day of DeFi business.

But the seemingly innocent video software was quietly compromised, allowing attackers to access their entire device through a backdoor.

Why crack the code? Isn't it simpler to breach trust directly?

The victim signed a delegated authorization transaction— a routine operation that happens thousands of times a day in DeFi.

A protocol that allows you to manage your positions without touching private keys. Generally, signing these agreements is faster than reading the terms of service.

Click. Sign. Instant "liquidation."

From signature to financial ruin, just six seconds.

A compromised video client handed over the management rights of a $13 million wallet to the patient attackers waiting for their opportunity.

Most phishing stories end here— the whale suffers, the attacker disappears, and the mockery of the victim continues on Twitter for a week.

But this time, the thief's plan was far more ambitious than a simple "clean out."

What happens when stealing millions is not enough to satisfy?

The Theft Operation

09:05:36 UTC. Just six seconds after the whale signed their "crypto suicide pact," the attacker initiated a "masterpiece" of a flash loan.

Vulnerability transaction: 0x4216f924ceec9f45ff7ffdfdad0cea71239603ce3c22056a9f09054581836286

Venus Protocol's post-incident analysis detailed the attacker's operational strategy:

Step one: Flash borrow 285.72 BTCB— after all, why use your own money? DeFi allows you to borrow millions without collateral.

Step two: Use the borrowed funds to pay off the victim's existing debts while adding 21 BTCB from the attacker's own account. It seems generous, but it's a cold-blooded "accounting murder."

Step three: Activate delegated permissions. Transfer all of the victim's digital assets— including $19.8 million in vUSDT, $7.15 million in vUSDC, 285 BTCB, and a long list of other tokens. All of this is completely legal because that "naive" signature from six seconds ago authorized it.

Step four: A brilliant strike. Use these just-stolen assets as collateral to borrow $7.14 million in USDC based on the victim's remaining BNB. The attacker not only drained the wallet but also made the victim pay for their own "theft."

Step five: Borrow enough BTCB to repay the flash loan. The transaction completed, the attacker quietly vanished.

An automated trade, a drained whale, a very satisfied crypto thief— they just turned someone else's life savings into their collateral playground.

However, greed often turns hunters into prey.

What happens when a "perfect heist" turns into a "suicide mission"?

Response Measures

09:09 UTC. Four minutes after the digital bank heist, monitoring systems from Hexagate and Hypernative began to sound alarms.

This was not an ordinary "suspicious transaction detected" alert.

This was a level five alarm for a $13 million theft, and the security company immediately knew who to contact.

Venus Protocol's response? The nuclear option was activated.

From theft to protocol suspension, it took only twenty minutes. Venus activated their own termination switch, freezing all core functions of the entire ecosystem.

Lending? Stopped. Withdrawals? Terminated. Liquidations? Paused.

One user encountered phishing, and the entire protocol came to a standstill.

This was not just crisis control— it was a financial battle.

Venus decisively restricted their own platform, trying to trap the stolen goods taken by the attacker.

Every vToken held by the hacker instantly turned into worthless scraps of paper, locked under Venus's emergency permissions.

But freezing an entire DeFi protocol to save one whale? Such a decision could not be made solely by the development team.

Thus, democracy came into play: an emergency governance vote.

When the community has only twelve hours to decide whether to use centralized means to save one user's wealth, can you really call it decentralized?

Lightning Democracy

Venus not only paused the protocol but also called for an emergency "online meeting" that would make any Web2 crisis management team envious.

They called it "lightning voting."

After all, nothing embodies "grassroots governance" more than compressing a multi-million dollar decision into a few hours of heated Discord debate.

The proposal was straightforward:

Phase one: Partially restore functions (to prevent users from being liquidated).

Phase two: Force liquidate the attacker's positions.

Phase three: Conduct a comprehensive security audit to prevent similar incidents from happening again.

Phase four: Fully restore Venus's operations.

Community response? 100% unanimous approval.

Not 99%. Not 98%.

Every single vote supported Venus's action plan, as if it were some sort of DeFi version of a North Korean election result.

Perhaps this was true consensus, or perhaps it was self-preservation.

Or when your protocol is bleeding millions, and competitors circle like vultures, disagreement becomes a luxury no one can afford.

By the afternoon, Venus was authorized.

Next came the execution of the most controversial liquidation operation in DeFi history— an operation that required bypassing smart contract rules to forcibly seize the attacker's collateral.

The victim was in crisis due to a mistaken transaction signature, and Venus was about to sign the "death certificate of democracy."

What happens when "code is law" meets emergency permissions?

Recovery Action

21:36 UTC. Twelve hours after the theft, Venus executed their counterattack.

Remember the mistake made by the attacker out of greed? Using the stolen funds as collateral was about to become the most expensive blunder in history.

One transaction, multiple commands, igniting the greatest controversy.

Liquidation: Initiated. Asset seizure: Completed. Liquidation: Closed.

Venus just performed surgery on a running blockchain. They activated the termination switch, grabbed all unlocked assets, and destroyed all evidence.

The attacker's "masterpiece" ultimately became their own death sentence. Those stolen collaterals lay safely in Venus's liquidity pool?

Suddenly, the newly activated "emergency liquidation" power of the protocol became a fair game.

Greed is a poison. Stealing millions, using it as collateral, and then being liquidated by one's own stolen funds.

21:58 UTC. Lights back on. Funds recovered. Crisis averted.

But no one was talking about the $13 million loss anymore. People were discussing how Venus proved in these 12 hours that "decentralization" is merely a marketing slogan.

It turns out that your unstoppable DeFi protocol has a very stoppable emergency brake— and when the cost is high enough, they do not hesitate to use it.

When a revolution requires a king to maintain it, who is really being overthrown?

Victim's Voice

"While it may be considered foolish, it's better to remain silent than to speak and eliminate all doubt."

This is the Twitter bio of Kuan Sun, founder of Eureka Crypto and the victim of this $13 million theft.

Speaking of "foolishness," he published a detailed retrospective explaining how he was deceived.

Venus Protocol also confirmed that he was the one who fell victim to the phishing attack.

This social engineering tactic was quite sinister.

The attackers had been laying the groundwork since April of this year, infiltrating a "Stack Asia BD" contact that Sun met at a conference in Hong Kong.

Months of patient groundwork built trust through a familiar yet not overly intimate relationship. The malicious Zoom client had already provided the attackers with access to his device.

During the fake meeting: "Your microphone is not working, please upgrade." This was another layer of deception, covering for the attackers' operations in the background.

Then, the Chrome browser unexpectedly crashed. "Restore tabs?" Click.

Somehow, the trusted Rabby wallet extension was replaced with a fake version that removed all security warnings.

Venus withdrawals, just like he had done thousands of times before.

But this time, there were no risk warnings, no transaction simulation previews, no security checks. The compromised frontend disguised a delegated operation as a normal transaction.

Hardware wallets didn't matter. Rabby's security features didn't matter. When the frontend is poisoned, even the tightest security settings only provide a false sense of security.

Worse still, according to the victim's recollection, this attack was allegedly carried out by the Lazarus Group, an elite North Korean hacking organization that has been terrorizing the cryptocurrency space for years.

This time, he was not hooked by some rookie phisher but was precisely taken down by state-level digital warfare experts who may have honed this attack process to perfection.

Now, he thanks Venus Protocol, PeckShield, SlowMist, Chaos Labs, Hexagate, HyperactiveLabs, Binance, and others who helped him recover his funds.

This is a happy ending, thanks to a protocol willing to break its own rules when personal interests are at stake.

When the world's most seasoned hackers can deceive hardware wallets and security-conscious users, is anyone truly safe in DeFi?

In one transaction, Venus saved a whale while shattering the dream of decentralization.

The twelve hours of coordinated chaos proved that behind every so-called "decentralized" protocol lies a centralized "emergency button" masked by governance mechanisms.

Of course, the community voted— but when 100% consensus is reached faster than Discord debates about gas fees, you witness the greatest magic of democracy: making autocracy look like collective decision-making.

The attacker left empty-handed, the whale reclaimed their wealth, and Venus demonstrated that when faced with immense digital pressure, they can overturn their own code at any time.

Mission accomplished, reputation destroyed.

The real tragedy is not that someone fell victim to a Zoom phishing scam, but that we still pretend that protocols with emergency permissions are fundamentally different from the traditional financial systems they claim to replace.

If decentralization ceases to exist when it becomes inconvenient, did it ever exist at all?

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