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 own security configuration, stating that the protocol's single-verifier setup, which LayerZero had warned against, allowed the attack to occur. The attackers, believed to be North Korea's Lazarus Group, compromised two RPC nodes that LayerZero's verifier relied on, then launched a DDoS attack on other nodes to force failover to the compromised ones. This allowed the attackers to release 116,500 rsETH. LayerZero notes that the attack would not have been possible if Kelp had used a multi-verifier setup with redundancy, as recommended. The company has confirmed that no other applications on the protocol were affected and will no longer support single-verifier configurations.