Glossary
Oracle Manipulation
An exploit class where an attacker temporarily distorts a price oracle (often via flash loan against a thin AMM) to extract value from a downstream protocol.
Oracle manipulation exploits protocols that read prices from on-chain sources without sufficient time-weighting or robustness checks. Typical pattern: flash-loan a large amount, slam a thin AMM in one direction to move the spot price, read the manipulated price into a target lending market or perp DEX, and extract more value than the manipulation cost.
The 2022 Mango Markets exploit and many smaller incidents follow this pattern. Defenses include TWAP oracles, multi-source oracles (Chainlink, Pyth), and slippage-aware liquidation logic.