DeFi attacks: the first part of the recap

In the first part of this report, The Block Research gave a general overview of how DeFi attacks happen and how the following investigation process looks. In a year and a half since the first well-known exploit, $330M+ was stolen, and although the amount seems incredibly large, the situation could be much worse. The list below includes the most notorious attacks and even though the largest ones are included, it is not fully comprehensive.

The first known target of exploiters was a lending protocol bZx, which suffered from the use of flash loans. Before this attack, the crypto community has only heard of flash loans in connection to the Aave v1 launch so many were shocked by the presence of such hidden functionality in dYdX used in the bZx attack.