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3 YEAR
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Another day, another dormant DAO getting its governance picked apart.
Security monitor Defimon flagged that an attacker self-delegated around 504,000 $YAM, roughly 3.3% of total supply, which was enough to clear YAM Finance's governance quorum given how little the protocol is used these days. That address then submitted proposal #45 through YamGovernorAlpha with a blank "0x" description. The only real content is a single call to the Timelock contract's setPendingAdmin function, naming the attacker's own address as the new pending admin.
If that proposal passes and executes, the attacker could follow up with acceptAdmin and take full administrative control of the Timelock, which governs YAM's contracts and its DAO treasury. Defimon put the exposed value at roughly $337,000 and pushed out a public warning telling remaining holders to vote no before block 25,897,343, giving them about 34 hours at the time of the alert. Nothing has been drained yet, this is still a pending vote, not a completed exploit.
This fits a pattern that's shown up repeatedly this year. StrongBlock lost about $72,000 in August after an attacker took over its abandoned governance. Term Labs got hit for $8.5 million the same month after someone spent under $1,000 to grab a controlling stake in its governance token. BonkDAO lost around $20 million in July when just seven wallets voted and the attacker's stake alone was enough to push through a treasury transfer. Binance separately said it caught and helped block a $1.2 million governance attack on an unnamed DAO in August.
The common thread is low voter turnout letting a modest token buy translate into outsized control. ENS DAO responded to the BonkDAO incident by standing up a security council that can veto malicious proposals, something YAM apparently doesn't have.
Curious whether YAM's remaining holders have enough coordination left to vote this down in time. Anyone still tracking this one?
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Security monitor Defimon flagged that an attacker self-delegated around 504,000 $YAM, roughly 3.3% of total supply, which was enough to clear YAM Finance's governance quorum given how little the protocol is used these days. That address then submitted proposal #45 through YamGovernorAlpha with a blank "0x" description. The only real content is a single call to the Timelock contract's setPendingAdmin function, naming the attacker's own address as the new pending admin.
If that proposal passes and executes, the attacker could follow up with acceptAdmin and take full administrative control of the Timelock, which governs YAM's contracts and its DAO treasury. Defimon put the exposed value at roughly $337,000 and pushed out a public warning telling remaining holders to vote no before block 25,897,343, giving them about 34 hours at the time of the alert. Nothing has been drained yet, this is still a pending vote, not a completed exploit.
This fits a pattern that's shown up repeatedly this year. StrongBlock lost about $72,000 in August after an attacker took over its abandoned governance. Term Labs got hit for $8.5 million the same month after someone spent under $1,000 to grab a controlling stake in its governance token. BonkDAO lost around $20 million in July when just seven wallets voted and the attacker's stake alone was enough to push through a treasury transfer. Binance separately said it caught and helped block a $1.2 million governance attack on an unnamed DAO in August.
The common thread is low voter turnout letting a modest token buy translate into outsized control. ENS DAO responded to the BonkDAO incident by standing up a security council that can veto malicious proposals, something YAM apparently doesn't have.
Curious whether YAM's remaining holders have enough coordination left to vote this down in time. Anyone still tracking this one?
Want to start trading? Sign up on fomo.family and save 10% on trading fees!