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Event Overview: A whale on Venus Protocol fell victim to a hacked Zoom client, signing a malicious authorization transaction that led to the theft of $13 million in assets.
Attack Process: The attacker utilized flash loans to repay the victim’s debt and transfer their assets, ultimately using the stolen funds as collateral to borrow more.
Emergency Response: Within 20 minutes, Venus suspended protocol functions and initiated an emergency governance vote. The community unanimously passed a rescue proposal.
Fund Recovery: Twelve hours later, Venus forcibly liquidated the attacker’s positions, successfully recovering the funds. However, this move sparked controversy over decentralized principles.
Victim Background: The victim was Kuan Sun, founder of Eureka Crypto, who fell prey to a social engineering attack by the state-backed hacker group Lazarus.
Controversial Focus: The protocol’s centralized intervention—freezing and manipulating operations—exposed the tension between "emergency powers" and decentralized ideals in DeFi projects.
---
Summary
Author: Rekt News
Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Click here to lose $13 million.
A Venus Protocol whale just learned the hard way that a Zoom call can cost more than a mortgage.
A malicious video client, a perfectly timed signature, and $13 million vanished faster than a rug pull announcement.
But the twist in this story? Venus didn’t just stand by and watch a user get drained.
They shut down their protocol, emergency-called a vote, and executed one of DeFi’s most controversial “rescue operations” in under 12 hours.
What began as a seemingly ordinary phishing attack turned into a masterclass on whether decentralized protocols can truly “have their cake and eat it too.”
When saving a whale means exposing the protocol’s hidden kill switch, who really gets rescued?
Source: Peckshield, Venus Protocol, Blocksec, Kuan Sun
---
The Attack
On September 2, at 09:05 UTC, a Venus Protocol whale fired up their Zoom client, ready to start another day of DeFi business.
But the seemingly innocent video software had been silently compromised, giving attackers backdoor access to their entire device.
Why hack the code when it’s easier to hack trust?
The victim signed a delegated authorization transaction—a routine permission action that happens thousands of times daily in DeFi.
Protocols that manage your positions without touching private keys. Generally, signing these takes less time than reading terms of service.
Click. Sign. Instant “liquidation.”
Six seconds from signature to financial ruin.
A compromised video client had just handed over management rights of a $13 million wallet to a patiently waiting attacker.
Most phishing stories end here—whale rekt, attacker gone, a week of Twitter ridicule for the victim.
But this time, the thief’s plan was far more ambitious than a simple smash-and-grab.
What happens when stealing millions isn’t enough?
The Heist
09:05:36 UTC. Six seconds after the whale signed their “crypto suicide note,” the attacker launched a flash loan “masterpiece.”
Exploit Tx: 0x4216f924ceec9f45ff7ffdfdad0cea71239603ce3c22056a9f09054581836286
Venus Protocol’s post-mortem detailed the attacker’s playbook:
Step 1: Flash-borrow 285.72 BTCB—after all, why use your own money? DeFi lets you borrow millions collateral-free.
Step 2: Use the borrowed funds to repay the victim’s existing debt, while adding 21 BTCB from the attacker’s own account. Seemingly generous, but coldly calculated “accounting murder.”
Step 3: Activate delegation permissions. Transfer all the victim’s digital assets—including $19.8M in vUSDT, $7.15M in vUSDC, 285 BTCB, and a long list of other tokens. All perfectly legal, thanks to that “innocent” signature six seconds earlier.
Step 4: The masterstroke. Use the stolen assets as collateral to borrow $7.14M in USDC against the victim’s remaining BNB. The attacker didn’t just empty the wallet—they made the victim pay for their own theft.
Step 5: Borrow enough BTCB to repay the flash loan. Transaction complete. Attacker vanishes.
One automated trade, one emptied whale, one very satisfied crypto thief—they’d just turned someone’s life savings into their collateral playground.
But greed often turns hunters into prey.
What happens when a “perfect heist” becomes a “suicide mission”?
---
The Response
09:09 UTC. Four minutes into the digital bank heist, monitoring systems at Hexagate and Hypernative started blaring alarms.
This wasn’t your average “suspicious transaction detected” alert.
This was a $13 million, five-alarm fire, and security firms knew exactly who to call.
Venus Protocol’s response? Go straight to the nuclear option.
Twenty minutes from theft to protocol pause. Venus activated their own kill switch, freezing all core functions across the entire ecosystem.
Borrowing? Stopped. Withdrawals? Terminated. Liquidations? Paused.
One user gets phished, and the entire protocol grinds to a halt.
This wasn’t just crisis control—it was financial warfare.
Venus had deliberately hamstrung its own platform, trying to trap the attacker’s stolen loot.
Every vToken the hacker held instantly became worthless paper, locked under Venus’s emergency powers.
But freezing an entire DeFi protocol to save one whale? That’s not a decision a dev team can make alone.
Enter democracy: emergency governance vote.
When a community has twelve hours to decide whether to centrally save one user’s fortune, can you really call it decentralized?
Flash Democracy
Venus didn’t just pause the protocol—they convened an emergency “war room” that would make any Web2 crisis team jealous.
They called it a “flash vote.”
After all, nothing says “grassroots governance” like compressing million-dollar decisions into hours of Discord fervor.
The proposal was straightforward:
Phase 1: Partially restore functions (let users avoid liquidation).
Phase 2: Force-liquidate the attacker’s positions.
Phase 3: Conduct a full security review to prevent repeats.
Phase 4: Fully restore Venus operations.
The community’s response? 100% unanimous approval.
Not 99%. Not 98%.
Every single vote supported Venus’s plan of action, like some kind of DeFi North Korean election result.
Maybe it was true consensus. Maybe it was self-preservation.
Or maybe when your protocol is bleeding millions and competitors are circling like vultures, dissent is a luxury no one can afford.
By afternoon, Venus had its mandate.
Next up: executing the most controversial liquidation in DeFi history—an operation that required bypassing smart contract rules to forcibly seize the attacker’s collateral.
The victim was in crisis because of one bad signature, and Venus was about to sign democracy’s death certificate.
What happens when “code is law” meets emergency powers?
---
The Recovery
21:36 UTC. Twelve hours after the theft, Venus executed their counterstrike.
Remember the attacker’s greedy mistake? Using stolen funds as collateral was about to become the costliest error ever made.
One transaction, multiple instructions, maximum controversy.
Liquidation: initiated. Asset seizure: complete. Liquidation: closed.
Venus had just performed surgery on a live blockchain. Flipped the kill switch, grabbed every unlocked asset, and burned the evidence.
The attacker’s “masterpiece” had become their own death sentence. All that stolen collateral, sitting pretty in Venus’s pools?
Suddenly, the protocol’s newly activated “emergency liquidation” powers were fair game.
Greed is poison. Steal millions, use it as collateral, get liquidated by your own stolen funds.
21:58 UTC. Lights back on. Funds recovered. Crisis averted.
But no one was talking about the $13 million saved. They were talking about how Venus had just proven, in twelve hours, that “decentralization” is a marketing term.
Turns out, your unstoppable DeFi protocol has a very stoppable emergency brake—and they’re not afraid to use it when the price is right.
When the revolution needs a king to survive, who’s really being overthrown?
---
The Victim Speaks
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
That’s the Twitter bio of Kuan Sun, founder of Eureka Crypto and the victim of this $13 million theft.
On “foolishness,” he published a detailed post-mortem explaining exactly how he was tricked.
Venus Protocol confirmed he was the phishing victim.
The social engineering was vicious.
The attackers had been laying the groundwork since April, compromising a “Stack Asia BD” contact Sun had met at a Hong Kong conference.
Months of patient grooming, building trust through familiarity without overfamiliarity. The malicious Zoom client had already given the attackers access to his device.
During a fake meeting: “Your mic isn’t working, please upgrade.” Another layer of the scam, covering for background operations.
Then, Chrome crashed unexpectedly. “Restore tabs?” Click.
Somehow, his trusted Rabby wallet extension was replaced with a fake version that stripped all security warnings.
Venus withdrawal, like he’d done thousands of times before.
But this time, no risk warnings, no transaction simulation preview, no security checks. The poisoned frontend disguised an authorization as a normal transaction.
Hardware wallet didn’t matter. Rabby’s security features didn’t matter. When the frontend is poisoned, even the tightest security is just theater.
Worse, according to the victim’s account, the attack was allegedly carried out by Lazarus Group—North Korea’s elite hackers, a longstanding terror in the crypto space.
He wasn’t phished by some script kiddie. He was precision-targeted by national-level digital warfare experts who’ve likely perfected this very playbook.
Now, he thanks Venus Protocol, PeckShield, SlowMist, Chaos Labs, Hexagate, Hypernative, Binance, and others who helped recover the funds.
It’s a happy ending, thanks to a protocol willing to break its own rules when it’s personal.
When the world’s most sophisticated hackers can fool hardware wallets and security-conscious users, is anyone in DeFi truly safe?
---
Conclusion
Venus saved a whale and shattered the decentralized dream in one transaction.
Twelve hours of coordinated chaos proved that every so-called “decentralized” protocol hides a centralized “panic button” behind governance theater.
Sure, the community voted—but when 100% consensus arrives faster than a Discord argument over gas fees, you’ve witnessed democracy’s greatest magic trick: making authoritarianism look like collective decision-making.
Attacker walked away empty-handed. Whale got their fortune back. And Venus demonstrated they’ll overturn their own code the moment the digital pressure gets too high.
Mission accomplished. Reputation destroyed.
The real tragedy isn’t that someone fell for a Zoom phishing scam. It’s that we still pretend protocols with emergency powers are fundamentally different from the traditional financial systems they claim to replace.
If decentralization dies the moment it becomes inconvenient, did it ever really exist?
Event Overview: A whale on Venus Protocol fell victim to a hacked Zoom client, signing a malicious authorization transaction that led to the theft of $13 million in assets.
Attack Process: The attacker utilized flash loans to repay the victim’s debt and transfer their assets, ultimately using the stolen funds as collateral to borrow more.
Emergency Response: Within 20 minutes, Venus suspended protocol functions and initiated an emergency governance vote. The community unanimously passed a rescue proposal.
Fund Recovery: Twelve hours later, Venus forcibly liquidated the attacker’s positions, successfully recovering the funds. However, this move sparked controversy over decentralized principles.
Victim Background: The victim was Kuan Sun, founder of Eureka Crypto, who fell prey to a social engineering attack by the state-backed hacker group Lazarus.
Controversial Focus: The protocol’s centralized intervention—freezing and manipulating operations—exposed the tension between "emergency powers" and decentralized ideals in DeFi projects.
---
Summary
Author: Rekt News
Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Click here to lose $13 million.
A Venus Protocol whale just learned the hard way that a Zoom call can cost more than a mortgage.
A malicious video client, a perfectly timed signature, and $13 million vanished faster than a rug pull announcement.
But the twist in this story? Venus didn’t just stand by and watch a user get drained.
They shut down their protocol, emergency-called a vote, and executed one of DeFi’s most controversial “rescue operations” in under 12 hours.
What began as a seemingly ordinary phishing attack turned into a masterclass on whether decentralized protocols can truly “have their cake and eat it too.”
When saving a whale means exposing the protocol’s hidden kill switch, who really gets rescued?
Source: Peckshield, Venus Protocol, Blocksec, Kuan Sun
---
The Attack
On September 2, at 09:05 UTC, a Venus Protocol whale fired up their Zoom client, ready to start another day of DeFi business.
But the seemingly innocent video software had been silently compromised, giving attackers backdoor access to their entire device.
Why hack the code when it’s easier to hack trust?
The victim signed a delegated authorization transaction—a routine permission action that happens thousands of times daily in DeFi.
Protocols that manage your positions without touching private keys. Generally, signing these takes less time than reading terms of service.
Click. Sign. Instant “liquidation.”
Six seconds from signature to financial ruin.
A compromised video client had just handed over management rights of a $13 million wallet to a patiently waiting attacker.
Most phishing stories end here—whale rekt, attacker gone, a week of Twitter ridicule for the victim.
But this time, the thief’s plan was far more ambitious than a simple smash-and-grab.
What happens when stealing millions isn’t enough?
The Heist
09:05:36 UTC. Six seconds after the whale signed their “crypto suicide note,” the attacker launched a flash loan “masterpiece.”
Exploit Tx: 0x4216f924ceec9f45ff7ffdfdad0cea71239603ce3c22056a9f09054581836286
Venus Protocol’s post-mortem detailed the attacker’s playbook:
Step 1: Flash-borrow 285.72 BTCB—after all, why use your own money? DeFi lets you borrow millions collateral-free.
Step 2: Use the borrowed funds to repay the victim’s existing debt, while adding 21 BTCB from the attacker’s own account. Seemingly generous, but coldly calculated “accounting murder.”
Step 3: Activate delegation permissions. Transfer all the victim’s digital assets—including $19.8M in vUSDT, $7.15M in vUSDC, 285 BTCB, and a long list of other tokens. All perfectly legal, thanks to that “innocent” signature six seconds earlier.
Step 4: The masterstroke. Use the stolen assets as collateral to borrow $7.14M in USDC against the victim’s remaining BNB. The attacker didn’t just empty the wallet—they made the victim pay for their own theft.
Step 5: Borrow enough BTCB to repay the flash loan. Transaction complete. Attacker vanishes.
One automated trade, one emptied whale, one very satisfied crypto thief—they’d just turned someone’s life savings into their collateral playground.
But greed often turns hunters into prey.
What happens when a “perfect heist” becomes a “suicide mission”?
---
The Response
09:09 UTC. Four minutes into the digital bank heist, monitoring systems at Hexagate and Hypernative started blaring alarms.
This wasn’t your average “suspicious transaction detected” alert.
This was a $13 million, five-alarm fire, and security firms knew exactly who to call.
Venus Protocol’s response? Go straight to the nuclear option.
Twenty minutes from theft to protocol pause. Venus activated their own kill switch, freezing all core functions across the entire ecosystem.
Borrowing? Stopped. Withdrawals? Terminated. Liquidations? Paused.
One user gets phished, and the entire protocol grinds to a halt.
This wasn’t just crisis control—it was financial warfare.
Venus had deliberately hamstrung its own platform, trying to trap the attacker’s stolen loot.
Every vToken the hacker held instantly became worthless paper, locked under Venus’s emergency powers.
But freezing an entire DeFi protocol to save one whale? That’s not a decision a dev team can make alone.
Enter democracy: emergency governance vote.
When a community has twelve hours to decide whether to centrally save one user’s fortune, can you really call it decentralized?
Flash Democracy
Venus didn’t just pause the protocol—they convened an emergency “war room” that would make any Web2 crisis team jealous.
They called it a “flash vote.”
After all, nothing says “grassroots governance” like compressing million-dollar decisions into hours of Discord fervor.
The proposal was straightforward:
Phase 1: Partially restore functions (let users avoid liquidation).
Phase 2: Force-liquidate the attacker’s positions.
Phase 3: Conduct a full security review to prevent repeats.
Phase 4: Fully restore Venus operations.
The community’s response? 100% unanimous approval.
Not 99%. Not 98%.
Every single vote supported Venus’s plan of action, like some kind of DeFi North Korean election result.
Maybe it was true consensus. Maybe it was self-preservation.
Or maybe when your protocol is bleeding millions and competitors are circling like vultures, dissent is a luxury no one can afford.
By afternoon, Venus had its mandate.
Next up: executing the most controversial liquidation in DeFi history—an operation that required bypassing smart contract rules to forcibly seize the attacker’s collateral.
The victim was in crisis because of one bad signature, and Venus was about to sign democracy’s death certificate.
What happens when “code is law” meets emergency powers?
---
The Recovery
21:36 UTC. Twelve hours after the theft, Venus executed their counterstrike.
Remember the attacker’s greedy mistake? Using stolen funds as collateral was about to become the costliest error ever made.
One transaction, multiple instructions, maximum controversy.
Liquidation: initiated. Asset seizure: complete. Liquidation: closed.
Venus had just performed surgery on a live blockchain. Flipped the kill switch, grabbed every unlocked asset, and burned the evidence.
The attacker’s “masterpiece” had become their own death sentence. All that stolen collateral, sitting pretty in Venus’s pools?
Suddenly, the protocol’s newly activated “emergency liquidation” powers were fair game.
Greed is poison. Steal millions, use it as collateral, get liquidated by your own stolen funds.
21:58 UTC. Lights back on. Funds recovered. Crisis averted.
But no one was talking about the $13 million saved. They were talking about how Venus had just proven, in twelve hours, that “decentralization” is a marketing term.
Turns out, your unstoppable DeFi protocol has a very stoppable emergency brake—and they’re not afraid to use it when the price is right.
When the revolution needs a king to survive, who’s really being overthrown?
---
The Victim Speaks
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
That’s the Twitter bio of Kuan Sun, founder of Eureka Crypto and the victim of this $13 million theft.
On “foolishness,” he published a detailed post-mortem explaining exactly how he was tricked.
Venus Protocol confirmed he was the phishing victim.
The social engineering was vicious.
The attackers had been laying the groundwork since April, compromising a “Stack Asia BD” contact Sun had met at a Hong Kong conference.
Months of patient grooming, building trust through familiarity without overfamiliarity. The malicious Zoom client had already given the attackers access to his device.
During a fake meeting: “Your mic isn’t working, please upgrade.” Another layer of the scam, covering for background operations.
Then, Chrome crashed unexpectedly. “Restore tabs?” Click.
Somehow, his trusted Rabby wallet extension was replaced with a fake version that stripped all security warnings.
Venus withdrawal, like he’d done thousands of times before.
But this time, no risk warnings, no transaction simulation preview, no security checks. The poisoned frontend disguised an authorization as a normal transaction.
Hardware wallet didn’t matter. Rabby’s security features didn’t matter. When the frontend is poisoned, even the tightest security is just theater.
Worse, according to the victim’s account, the attack was allegedly carried out by Lazarus Group—North Korea’s elite hackers, a longstanding terror in the crypto space.
He wasn’t phished by some script kiddie. He was precision-targeted by national-level digital warfare experts who’ve likely perfected this very playbook.
Now, he thanks Venus Protocol, PeckShield, SlowMist, Chaos Labs, Hexagate, Hypernative, Binance, and others who helped recover the funds.
It’s a happy ending, thanks to a protocol willing to break its own rules when it’s personal.
When the world’s most sophisticated hackers can fool hardware wallets and security-conscious users, is anyone in DeFi truly safe?
---
Conclusion
Venus saved a whale and shattered the decentralized dream in one transaction.
Twelve hours of coordinated chaos proved that every so-called “decentralized” protocol hides a centralized “panic button” behind governance theater.
Sure, the community voted—but when 100% consensus arrives faster than a Discord argument over gas fees, you’ve witnessed democracy’s greatest magic trick: making authoritarianism look like collective decision-making.
Attacker walked away empty-handed. Whale got their fortune back. And Venus demonstrated they’ll overturn their own code the moment the digital pressure gets too high.
Mission accomplished. Reputation destroyed.
The real tragedy isn’t that someone fell for a Zoom phishing scam. It’s that we still pretend protocols with emergency powers are fundamentally different from the traditional financial systems they claim to replace.
If decentralization dies the moment it becomes inconvenient, did it ever really exist?
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