Oracle manipulation

Oracle manipulation is an attack where someone distorts the price or data feed a smart contract relies on, tricking it into executing on false information. Readers should care because it's one of the most common ways lending and derivatives protocols lose money, even when their own code has no bugs. A classic example: in October 2022, an attacker on Mango Markets pushed the price of MNGO token up sharply through large trades on thin liquidity, then used that inflated price as collateral to borrow and drain about $114 million from the protocol. Protocols try to defend against this with time-weighted average prices, multiple independent data sources, or Chainlink-style decentralized oracle networks, but any feed that can be temporarily skewed remains a target.