Written by: Muriuki Lazaro, AMB Crypto

INK Finance is a treasury management and workspace infrastructure protocol deployed on Polygon, focused on DeFi, which recently faced a severe authorization vulnerability attack.

The attackers exploited weak links in the platform's treasury validation logic, ultimately stealing approximately $140,000 in funds.

The key to this attack was that a forged claimer contract successfully impersonated an approved whitelisted entity within the treasury system.

Due to this bypass, the attackers were able to pass qualification checks and trigger an "authorized" treasury transfer without being immediately restricted.

At the same time, the attackers accelerated the execution of the exploit by utilizing a flash loan of approximately $25,000 from Balancer V2 routed through Railgun to Polygon.

This flow of funds also highlights that as the interconnectivity of DeFi infrastructures deepens, the interconnectedness between liquidity systems is increasing the efficiency of attack execution.

Reports indicate that the attackers did not target high-level encryption layers, but instead exploited operational trust assumptions surrounding whitelisted permissions, reinforcing concerns about weak authorization design in treasury architectures.

Treasury Authorization Systems Are Becoming a Weak Link in DeFi

This treasury vulnerability incident reflects a broader change in the attack surface of DeFi: as infrastructure complexity rises, attackers are no longer just focusing on liquidity pools or pricing systems but are increasingly targeting high-authority treasury authorization layers that control protocol reserve funds.

The incident with INK Finance also illustrates that attackers are targeting treasury authorization systems in a low-cost, high-precision manner.

This trend indicates that modern attack methods are placing greater emphasis on privilege escalation rather than merely broader liquidity manipulation.

Meanwhile, similar whitelisting and access control incidents have been continuously increasing in the DAO treasury systems of 2026, repeatedly exposing the weaknesses in operational verification during the expansion of DeFi infrastructure.

However, these persistent authorization flaws also indicate that decentralized finance is still lagging behind in operational security maturity relative to the growth rate of its infrastructure and capital size.

Small-Scale Attacks Are Eroding Confidence in DeFi

Increasingly frequent attacks targeting treasury authorizations are gradually undermining market confidence in DeFi infrastructure as a whole.

Although the loss amount for INK Finance is relatively not particularly large, this incident quickly appeared in security dashboards and on-chain monitoring systems.

This visibility is important because users often perceive repeatedly occurring small-scale security incidents as a signal that the underlying infrastructure of the ecosystem remains fragile.

Reports also mention similar incidents involving SmartCredit, Sharwa, and Quant, which continuously reinforce external concerns about weak operational security discipline.

This incident demonstrates that even if direct economic losses are limited, small-scale attacks can still have a disproportionate market impact since ongoing authorization failures gradually undermine user confidence, slow down capital deployment, and increase risk awareness across the interconnected system.

However, many of these vulnerabilities still stem from avoidable permission configuration issues rather than extremely complex technical failures.

In simple terms, operational security maturity still lags behind the development of infrastructure complexity.

Brief Summary

• INK Finance lost approximately $140,000 due to attackers bypassing whitelist verification through a forged claimer contract.
• The recurring small-scale authorization attacks in DeFi are continuously undermining user trust in the industry's infrastructure.

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