What Is a ‘Governance Attack’ in a DAO?

A governance attack is a malicious attempt to manipulate a DAO's voting system to pass a proposal that benefits the attacker at the expense of the protocol or its users. This can involve exploiting low voter turnout, temporarily acquiring a large amount of governance tokens (a "51% attack"), or passing a proposal to drain the treasury or grant the attacker special privileges.

The attacker uses the protocol's own legitimate governance mechanism to execute a financial exploit.