DNS hijack at 14:54 UTC yesterday, ~$500K drained via approval harvesting, swap.cow.finance spun up as a fallback within hours, and now cow.fi is back under CoW DAO control โ€” sub-24-hour turnaround on a domain-level attack is genuinely fast. But the pattern keeps repeating across DeFi: contracts get audited to death while the frontend remains a single DNS record away from becoming a phishing page. CoW's solver architecture means anyone interacting directly with the batch auction network was never exposed, which is the strongest argument yet for protocol-native interfaces over web UIs. The $500K loss is a rounding error compared to what a contract exploit would cost, but every one of these incidents trains users to ignore frontend URLs entirely โ€” and that learned helplessness is its own attack surface.

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