To DEGO Community: Summary of the Event After a Thorough Investigation and Efforts

DEGO
3 min readFeb 12, 2022

Dear community members:

As you have probably heard about the recent hacking incident, we would like to summarise this event after a thorough investigation and efforts working with all partners like security experts and exchanges.

What happened?

At 3 AM UTC 10th/Feb/2022, we detected abnormal change of DEGO price on DEX and centralised exchange too.

The team looked into this anomaly and quickly concluded there has been a well-organised hacking event from approx. 11:29 PM UTC 9th/Feb/2022, targeting DEGO team addresses hosting DEGO tokens and DEX liquidity (DEGO/ETH, DEGO/BNB).

1. The hacker has drained DEGO pairs liquidity provided by the team on UniSwap and Pancake Swap, subsequently stealing 2613.40 BNB, 378.76 ETH and 492,316.41 DEGO tokens.

2. The hacker also hijacked DEGO’s Minting contract and minted a total of 1,185,164.71 DEGO tokens.

3. For ETH and BNB,

The hacker used Tornado.Cash to mix funds.

For DEGO tokens,

The Hacker liquidated 1,288,233.59 DEGO tokens through an instant exchange service (DEGO Price fell by 12.90% from $4.42 — $3.85 by 12 PM UTC 9th/Feb/2022), which operates accounts on centralised exchanges and offers No-KYC service. Some of the proceeds were converted to BTC and XMR and sent to the following addresses:

bc1qtjy0gy0s4pkhf0xs9lu5xqx9zn9f7p0awmc3zg

bc1qr3cvm5a7m8azxj8605e45enehfkm0y9yvnhrs4

bc1qm049eph90d9dtkt4g4xcsazerz5kpc0daah6fc

bc1qf3w6ce6hafpcf4r4kkksq5g9880epa5prpm5qu

bc1qn0z2zl6fxgdlyuq4e9fvka8qa629vfaejz56wx

bc1qgv83kgj5ceggy9v52p6938c42steredc0d6734

bc1q8n2djszhxzlpex7tnty92wk3vwwfqxkpayt8jc

48zy6ydcdqgDHD7ULVpWN5HRUgYm33ee7jG4Tu6bp7qeST33iH2Ch88YRq3noAJSG88kSuvBF16PfiZtQZwGrsdJALQhpJF

What did we do?

1. The team contacted major exchanges in private and made public announcements on Twitter to warn all centralised exchanges. We were lucky to receive a quick response from some exchanges that they have shut down DEGO token deposits temporarily to shield users from potential damage on markets.

https://twitter.com/dego_finance/status/1491633269330173956

2. After going through all team addresses, we have rescued a good amount of DEGO tokens and stored them somewhere safe.

3. We engaged SlowMist and Certik and PeckShield teams for professional advice and solutions.

4. We worked with EtherScan team and some of hacker’s addresses has been marked

0x118203b0f2a3ef9e749d871c8fef5e5e55ef5c91

0xC1259239d6faE6EEff783C02D2fFAB0841219B4e

A total of 602,562.35 DEGO tokens are still in the hacker’s possession but cannot be liquidated in major exchanges since the lockdown.

5. We thoroughly examined on-chain and exchange records to keep traces of funds and to identify the hacker.

A few words from the heart:

After the incident, we are happy to receive people’s caring messages and helping hands.

First of all, we are very grateful to all those who helped us and walked with us in this pickle.

Second, we have also heard a lot of conspiracy theories, and we would like to clarify that the team’s assets suffered the most financial loss in this incident, making us the biggest victim. We have been working hard on solutions and are pursuing help from law enforcement.

Last but not the least, thefts have become a major issue in the industry. DEGO team’s assets suffered the most financial loss in this incident, but we are not the only victim of this monstrosity and we have witnessed cases like Wormhole and Qubit whose team and users suffered a much larger loss. We would ask our peer entrepreneurs and all stakeholders to stay united against such thefts. We’ll keep all of you updated on the latest developments while working on a solution for remedy.

Whether the stolen funds can be recovered or not,

We carry on.

About DEGO Finance

DEGO Finance is an NFT+DeFi protocol and infrastructure with two functions: The project acts as an independent and open NFT ecosystem drawing users to the blockchain space. The NFT Suite offers services covering the full NFT lifecycle, enabling anyone to issue NFTs, participate in auctions, and trade NFTs. Recently, DEGO has embarked on a new journey on GameFi and will input more on R&D of Blockchain Games, Tokenisation of Game Assets, Asset Lending, and more.

Follow Us:

Twitter | Medium | Discord | Telegram

--

--