A sandwich attack stripped the hacker of nearly all stolen funds: a lesson in liquidity on Base
A striking incident occurred on the Base network that vividly demonstrates how dangerous negligence can be when working with decentralized protocols. The attacker managed to withdraw about 500,000 USDC from someone else's wallet, but his subsequent actions led to catastrophic financial losses for himself.
When attempting to convert the stolen stablecoins through a decentralized exchange, the hacker did not activate slippage protection. This proved to be a fatal mistake. An MEV bot immediately took advantage of this, carrying out a classic sandwich attack. The essence of the manipulation is that the bot places transactions before and after the victim's trade, artificially inflating the asset's price and profiting from the difference.
As a result of the attack, the hacker lost about $371,000 of the stolen amount, managing to keep only about $129,000. In other words, nearly three-quarters of the illegally obtained funds went not to the victim, but to an automated arbitrage algorithm. This is a striking example of irony in the DeFi world: a criminal expecting easy gains became the victim of a more sophisticated market manipulation mechanism himself.
This case highlights the critical importance of configuring trade parameters in decentralized protocols. Even experienced market participants sometimes ignore slippage protection, relying on default settings. However, in conditions of high volatility and active MEV bot activity, this can lead to a complete loss of funds, as happened in this situation.
My comment: This episode is not just a curiosity, but a systemic problem. MEV bots are becoming an integral part of the ecosystem, and their activity directly affects transaction security. For investors, this is a signal: even in automated operations, every parameter must be checked, otherwise you can lose more than you planned to steal or earn.