Balancer Exploit Leads to $3 Million Token Transfer

According to PANews, a recent exploit involving Balancer has resulted in the unauthorized transfer of approximately $3 million worth of tokens. The incident was highlighted by the GoPlus Chinese community on the X platform, revealing that the attacker used a Permit authorization to bypass security measures. Earlier today, the attacker managed to transfer 195 stS tokens from the frozen address 0xf19…fae2 to a new address 0x0e9c…44D5. These tokens were then exchanged for WBTC and ETH. The failure of the freeze was attributed to its implementation at the native chain level, which only affected S tokens and not other ERC20 tokens like stS. The stS tokens have a permit() method that allows off-chain signatures without requiring the frozen address to pay S, leading to the ineffectiveness of the freeze in this instance.