Audius Hack

TOTAL LOST $1.1M
Medium Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2022 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #822 By amount stolen
Auditors 1 Prior security audit

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

The Audius Platform got exploited by an attacker who passed a malicious proposal and voted it through by  himself. The attacker gained 18m $AUDIO token worth $6m USD but ultimately dumped the tokens in a single transaction for $1m USD.

Details of the Exploit

Audius is a decentralized music streaming and sharing platform that aims to empower content creators.The attacker realized an exploitable vulnerability in Audius governance, staking and delegation contracts. Due to an inconsistent storage layout between contracts, the attacker was able to re-initialize the governance contracts and redirect the ownership of the community treasury to his wallet through the malicious proposal #85.

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x4227bca8…980dc9

The attacker proceeded and dumped the ill-gotten 18,5m $AUDIO token with a massive slippage of approx. 80% on Uniswap for $1m worth of $WETH instead of potentially $6m worth of $WETH that a slower approach might have yielded

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x82fc2399…3f28b3.

The attacker immediately started to launder the ill-gotten funds through Tornado.Cash https://etherscan.io/address/0xa0c7bd31…b8ab4c.

The vulnerabilities have been patched by the team and the project has resumed to its operations.

Block Data Reference

Attackers Addresses:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xa0c7bd31…b8ab4c

Attacker smart contract used for draining the community treasury

https://etherscan.io/address/0xbdbb5945…f2e569

Audius Community Treasury

https://etherscan.io/address/0x4deca517…03abac

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Audius
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification Other
Primary Source View Post-Mortem #1 View Post-Mortem #2 View Post-Mortem #3 View Post-Mortem #4

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exploit/Other
Affected Token AUDIO
Official Website twitter.com/AudiusProject
Protocol Twitter/X @audius
Team Public / Doxxed
Source Code Unverified

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
Protocol Links
Discord Telegram

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 other and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in Audius's contract logic - root cause: other
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 Other audit checklist and test coverage
Audited by Kudelski Security — still lost $1.1M. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

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 Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation
  • 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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Security Audit History

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