TORN price falls 50% after attacker drains Tornado Cash DAO

• TORN’s price dropped more than 40%, falling from a high of $7.29 to a low of $3.55.
• This was after the Tornado Cash DAO passed a malicious proposal containing a bug from an attacker.
• Attackers who took full control of the Tornado Cash governance system leaked locked votes.

TORN’s price plummeted as the market reacted to crypto news about a malicious takeover of Tornado Cash governance.

In the market’s initial reaction, the TORN price plummeted by nearly 50%, with sellers pushing the token’s value from a high of $7.29 to a low of $3.55. The value of the token recovered above $4.40 as buyers tried to keep the bears at bay, although further losses could still materialize.

At the time of this writing, Tornado Cash ranks 1,103th by market capitalization on CoinGecko. With a market capitalization of $6.8 million, a total of $25.7 million worth of TORN has traded in the last 24 hours.

Attackers maliciously hijack Tornado Cash DAO

The price of Tornado Cash dropped after attackers hijacked the governance of the Tornado Cash DAO. The breach occurred after the community passed a malicious proposal that the attackers used to drain funds from the Governance Treasury.

Tornado Cash is a crypto-mixing service running on Ethereum. It was approved by the US Treasury Department in February 2023. A governance system will manage upgrades to the protocol and will be run by those who hold the project’s native TORN token.

On May 20, 2023, the attackers allegedly added additional functionality to an upgrade passed on by the TORN owner. This gave the unknown organization an additional 1.2 million votes of his and effectively controlled the cryptocurrency governance system.

On 2023/05/20 07:25:11 UTC, Tornado Cash governance effectively ceased to exist. A malicious suggestion allowed the attacker to grant himself his 1,200,000 votes. With over 700,000 legitimate votes, they are now in complete control.https://t.co/nY87XmrYgT pic.twitter.com/h9qjc3xRqz

@samczsun.com (@samczsun) May 20, 2023

As highlighted by pseudonymous cryptointelligence account Samczsun, the controls allowed the attackers to extract 10,000 votes in TORN tokens. They sold these he for $25,600 and used up the rest of the locked votes.

A total of 483,000 TORN were removed from vaults. 6,000 TORN have been deposited on cryptocurrency exchange Bitrue, 379,000 have been sold on-chain for $680,000 in Ether, and just under 100,000 TORN are still under the control of the attackers.

In the aftermath of the breach, Binance has announced that it will suspend TORN deposits until further notice.

Due to the circumstances surrounding the protocol, #binance temporarily stop $TORN Deposits are not guaranteed until further notice.

Binance (@binance) May 21, 2023

TRON founder Justin Sun Said TORN deposits and withdrawals on Huobi are still available. Meanwhile, the Tornado Cash team said they are working to fix the vulnerability.