According to CertiK, a security incident occurred in the NEAR ecosystem DeFi protocol Rhea Finance. The attacker created multiple fake token contracts and added liquidity to newly created pools, allegedly misleading the protocol’s oracle and validation layers, thereby extracting at least approximately $7.6 million in assets from the related pools. On April 18, Rhea Finance released an update regarding its security incident, stating that its lending market suffered an unauthorized attack on April 16, specifically targeting its leveraged trading functionality. The attacker exploited a potential vulnerability in the slippage protection mechanism, stealing approximately $18.4 million in assets from the protocol’s reserve pool. This resulted in actual losses within the protocol, affecting both reserve balances and participating users. The attacker has since returned approximately 3.359 million USDC and 1.564 million NEAR to the RHEA lending contract. In addition, 4.34 million USDT has been frozen—of which 3.291 million USDT was frozen by Tether in the attacker’s wallet, and 1.053 million USDT was frozen within NEAR Intent. Meanwhile, to ensure fund safety, the lending contract has been suspended, and recovery efforts are still ongoing. The team is actively attempting to contact the attacker in order to recover the remaining affected assets. Furthermore, the team has formally initiated tracking procedures with centralized exchanges to identify the account holder.