The DAO hacked again, but this time it’s the good guys

Ten years on from the most notorious hack in Ethereum history, The DAO has been exploited once again.

However, this time, far from 2016’s existential crisis, it’s actually good news.

In what a Security Alliance (SEAL) member described as a “long-planned whitehat rescue,” over 50 ether ($ETH) were rescued from an insecure contract.

The funds, worth over $100,000 had sat in a vulnerable smart contract for a decade. They currently sit in this recovery address.

Read more: 2025’s biggest crypto hacks: From exchange breaches to DeFi exploits

The 2016 hack of the original DAO saw 3.6 million $ETH lost. The sum was worth around $60 million at the time, but would now be valued at close to $8 billion.

Whitehat hackers subsequently sprang into action, racing to reverse engineer the hack and drain the contracts themselves in order to secure funds that blackhats may otherwise have gained.

This bought time until a longer-term solution could be decided on by the community.

The event caused such disruption to the Ethereum community that it collectively took the decision to fork the network, restoring the blockchain to its pre-hack state.

Today’s whitehat rescue was announced by “Giveth,” whose co-founder Griff Green worked on The DAO back in 2016.

It may be surprising that such a high profile codebase, especially from a security standpoint, would still contain an unidentified vulnerability a decade later. But a recent spate of blackhat attacks on older projects show that such hidden weaknesses may be more common than expected.

Read more: Legacy DeFi platforms lose $27M as hacking spree continues into 2026

The rescue mission comes on the back of more good news for the Ethereum security community.

Last week, Green pledged that recovered funds will be returned “to the people who put it there, or if unclaimed, [used] for funding Ethereum Security.”

Any unclaimed funds from today’s rescue will be added to the pot.