Aerodrome Finance Falls Victim to 'Front-End' Assault, Users Warned to Steer Clear of Main Website

Aerodrome Finance, a prominent decentralized exchange boasting $400 million in total value locked on Coinbase's Base network, suffered a front-end attack on Friday, prompting immediate warnings for users to avoid its primary website. The attack appears to be a DNS hijacking of Aerodrome's centralized domains, allowing attackers to divert users to fake phishing sites designed to deceive them into signing malicious transactions, thereby stripping them of their funds. As a precaution, users are advised to rely on Aerodrome's decentralized domains instead. Aerodrome has reached out to My.box, the domain provider, to investigate a potential exploit of their systems. These types of attacks do not compromise the underlying smart contracts that manage user funds and protocol logic on the blockchain. At the time of writing, it remains unconfirmed whether the attack has resulted in any losses or the number of affected users. Fortunately, liquidity pools and protocol treasuries remain intact, according to Aerodrome. The Aerodrome team has been posting live updates on X, warning users not to access the compromised domains, aerodrome.finance and aerodrome.box, and instead use decentralized ENS mirrors like aero.drome.eth.limo. To mitigate risk, the team suggests revoking recent token approvals using tools like Revoke.cash and avoiding the signing of any transactions from unverified domains. Aerodrome has previously experienced similar front-end attacks, including two incidents in late 2023 that led to approximately $300,000 in user losses. This latest attack occurs just days after Aerodrome announced a merger with Velodrome, consolidating liquidity across Base and Optimism under the new 'Aero' ecosystem. Despite the disruption, the AERO token price has remained stable at around $0.67, marking a 2% increase over the last 24 hours. The investigation into the attack is ongoing.