Tornado Cash DAO approves attacker’s governance proposal

The Tornado Cash DAO attacker’s proposal to return governance control to users passed on May 26 with 517,000 token votes in favor and zero against.

Last week, control of Tornado Cash DAO was taken hostilely by the attacker. They took over the DAO by publishing an initial proposal that contained malicious code that earned them fake 1.2 million votes, which they then used to pass more proposals and give themselves control of governance tokens that were vested. Surprisingly, just hours after the incident, the attacker published a proposal to restore control.

Related: Tornado Cash hacker sends a proposal to reverse the attack

On May 26, despite initial fears that the hacker might deceive Tornado Cash users, all participants voted in favor of the proposal. Fortunately, the hack didn’t affect the protocol itself, but the attacker still managed to steal some governance tokens.

According to Martin Lee, a data journalist at Nansen, a crypto analytics site, an attacker managed to steal 483,000 TORN tokens. They then exchanged a large portion of the tokens for 485 ETH, which was worth about $890,000. The remaining balance consisted of 39,000 TORN tokens, equivalent to $160,000. In order to disguise the origin of the funds, a portion of the stolen ETH was routed through Tornado Cash.

Tornado Cash attacker still loves the protocol

Swaps a large portion of the 483K TORN it exploited to ETH mostly using 1inch and proceeds to send 360 ETH to Tornado cash pic.twitter.com/N22tA3xgvG

— Martin Lee | Nansen (@themlpx) May 22, 2023

As a result of the attack, the TORN token lost 40% of its value, according to CoinMarketCap. Although the token rebounded somewhat after the reverse proposal was published, it’s still trading well below its May 20 price of $6.10. Also, the return of control of Tornado Cash DAO to users didn’t have much impact on the price. At the time of writing, TORN is trading at $4.29 and has risen 1.02% in the last 24 hours.