LayerZero Attributes $290 Million Exploit to Kelp's Security Setup and North Korea's Lazarus Group

LayerZero has attributed the $290 million Kelp DAO exploit to Kelp's security configuration, stating that the protocol's single-verifier setup, which LayerZero had warned against, was the primary cause. The attackers, believed to be North Korea's Lazarus Group, compromised two RPC nodes that LayerZero's verifier relied on, and then launched a DDoS attack on other nodes to force a failover to the compromised ones. This allowed the attackers to trick LayerZero's verifier into releasing 116,500 rsETH. LayerZero had recommended a multi-verifier setup, which would have prevented the attack. The company has confirmed that there was no contagion to other applications on the protocol and has since taken the verifier offline, stating it will no longer support single-verifier configurations.