AutoSharkFinance Hack

TOTAL LOST $2.0M
Medium Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2021 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #647 By amount stolen
Auditors 1 Prior security audit

Incident Overview

The attacker's address:

https://bscscan.com/address/0xfcf6738c…fc08f4

The example of transaction behind the attack:

https://bscscan.com/tx/0x8769f7ee…d6670f

The hack is made possible due to a profit inflation bug, which was exploited to donate a large amount of $NOVAs so that a huge amount of $JAWS tokens can be minted as a reward.

The attacker (based on the example tx):

- flash loaned 2.5K BNB

- swapped 569 BNB to 186.5K NOVA

- deposited  186.5K NOVA to Shiba's NOVA/WBNB LP

- called getReward() to swap 3.69e-06 NOVA to 561 BNB

- swapped 280 BNB to 3362 JAWS

- added liquidity with 280 BNB and 3362 JAWS into JAWS/WBNB LP, receiving 955 LP tokens

- minted 640,050 JAWS as a reward because of the inflated value of 955 JAWS/WBNB LP tokens

- called withdrawAll() to withdraw 640,050 JAWS

- swapped received JAWS to 509 BNB

Stolen funds were bridged into Ethereum. The attacker deposited ETH into Tornado Cash mixer:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xfcf6738c…fc08f4

Incident Report

Protocol / Project AutoSharkFinance
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification Exchange (DEX)
Primary Source View Post-Mortem #1 View Post-Mortem #2

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Yield
Affected Token SHARK
Official Website autoshark.finance/
Protocol Twitter/X @AutoSharkFin

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
Solana Ecosystem Polygon Ecosystem Fantom Ecosystem BNB Chain Ecosystem Aptos Ecosystem Sui Ecosystem MoveVM (MVM)
Protocol Links
GitHub Discord

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 AutoSharkFinance's contract logic - root cause: exchange (dex)
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 Audit Report 1 — still lost $2.0M. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to AutoSharkFinance, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2021).

  • 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

Sources & References

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