Greetings!
Only three hacks this week, but still causing the same $3M in losses. It’s been a slower week where we can finally catch up on fantastic research and tools, but first a quick note from our sponsor Cyfrin!
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Let’s start with Pike Finance which we first mentioned last week. The projects was compromised yet again. Some really concerning observations from the two hacks:
The initial April 26th vulnerability was identified by an auditor, which according to the project they did not patch it in a “timely manner”. Audits normally happen prior to going live so the issue was likely identified prior to the launch two days earlier. Why did the contract go live with a known critical bug? Contracts with a known critical vulnerability should not go live or be paused immediately upon learning of one until the patch is developed, tested, and applied.
The second April 30th exploit happened 6 minutes after the previously upgraded smart contract was exploited. The upgrade overwrote the initialized flag and allowed attacker to take ownership and steal all assets. It takes time respond to an incident, develop an upgrade and get it properly audited. Normally projects take weeks to months to relaunch. However, Pike Finance upgraded just days after the hack. Take time to properly test and audit all changes and upgrades to your smart contracts especially following a compromise.
Almost $2M could have been saved if not for repeatedly rushed actions by the project in launching and later mitigating their smart contracts.
Speaking of easily preventable hacks, GNUS token lost $1.27M due private key leak that was obtained by bad actors in a separate Discord hack. Discord! Why the heck were the private keys shared over such an insecure medium?
Address poisoning exploitation reached new levels after record breaking $72M were stolen. Bad actors continue evolving their tactics from the early zero transfer phishing to now simply dusting their victims with similar looking addresses. Luckily most of the stolen assets were soon returned thanks to detailed investigation by SlowMist. However, something tells me that the bad actor will continue the scheme for the foreseeable future.
PSA: Be wary of malicious wallet addresses injected into blockchain explorers or wallet transaction logs. Independently verify all addresses before sending.
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Oh and be sure to check out ZachXBT’s detailed write up on Lazarus money laundering techniques in the Research section below. Let’s dive into the news!
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