Audius Hack

TOTAL LOST $6.0M
Medium Malicious Governance Proposal ethereum

Summarize with AI

Affected Chain ethereum Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #398 By amount stolen
Year 2022 Incident year

Incident Overview

Audius (AUDIO) is a cryptocurrency and operates on the Ethereum platform. Audius has a current supply of 1,400,595,640. The last known price of Audius is 0.01922054 USD and is up 1.36 over the last 24 hours.

It is currently trading on 246 active market(s) with $2,373,324.10 traded over the last 24 hours. More information can be found at https://audius.co/.

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Audius
Date of Incident
Affected Chain(s) ethereum
Attack Technique Malicious Governance Proposal
Classification Protocol Logic
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Smart Contract Language Solidity
Official Website audius.co/
Protocol Twitter/X @audius

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
Music DAO Ethereum Ecosystem Coinbase Ventures Portfolio YZi Labs Portfolio Solana Ecosystem Pantera Capital Portfolio Multicoin Capital Portfolio

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.

Technical Knowledge Deep understanding of malicious governance proposal and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with ethereum smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in Audius's contract logic - root cause: protocol logic
Execution Speed Precise transaction ordering and timing to exploit the vulnerability within a single atomic block
Obfuscation Plan A strategy to launder and move stolen funds - typically through mixers, cross-chain bridges, or decentralized DEX swaps to resist tracing

What Auditors Should Check

Could this have been caught in audit? Likely — with a thorough Malicious Governance Proposal audit checklist and test coverage

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Audius, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (July 2022).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Malicious Governance Proposal are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Dao Governance 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.

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Related Attack Classes

The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:

See all Dao Governance Attacks examples →

Proof-of-Concept Exploits

1 PoC available

Sources & References

Learn to Prevent the Next Audius

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