Incident Overview
AragonDao fell victim to a fake token airdrop scam, resulting in a significant loss of funds 800k in USDC.
The exploit began with the attacker sending 7 USDC to AragonDao from a specific address (0x0cee33...CC3F0EBf). Subsequently, AragonDao was deceived into sending 800K USDC to the same spoofed address, resulting in a significant loss. The team responded by offering a 10% reward on the stolen assets, aiming to mitigate the impact of the attack.
The initial attack transaction https://etherscan.io/tx/0xf32b4fa4aae39fa6db1fbea575fc699320e980342e2b1a34c5a5ae52a56524e
Additionally, the transaction offering a 10% reward on the stolen assets is available at https://etherscan.io/tx/0xb5fae765adc4440967b27c05bd94d74fdd1029e767a961d07df74307e2c8d1
The attacker's deposit of $1.2M into TornadoCash can be found at https://etherscan.io/address/0x63d919e6…2e6574.
Incident Report
Protocol Information
Market Context at Time of Hack
What the Attacker Needed to Succeed
Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.
What Auditors Should Check
If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Aragon DAO, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (January 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Phishing are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Phishing Attacks attack class for patterns
- Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs
Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.
Free TrialRelated Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
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