Incident Overview
Bitrue Exchange experienced an exploit resulting in the loss of 21,882,489 $USD worth of assets from their hot wallet.
On April 14th, Bitrue,a centralized crypto exchange, suffered an attack on one of its hot wallets which led to the theft of 21,882,489 $USD worth of digital assets including 318 $ETH , 137,000 $QNT, 46,396,307 $GALA, 172,550,065,266 $SHIB, 756,149,367 $HOT and 310,071 $MATIC. The attacker gained access to Bitrue's hot wallet due to an access leak. In just six transactions within four hours after gaining control over the funds, they were able to withdraw all the Exchange’s assets into their own private wallet.
The malicious actor then swapped stolen tokens for $ETH through Uniswap and already converted 18,610,517 $USD. The rest 3,271,972 $USD worth of stolen assets such as $SHIB and $HOT remains at the attacker's address at the moment.
Attacker address:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x1819ede3…9ba5a5
Affected Hot Wallet Address:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x34d88cee…36731a
Example Swap Transaction:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x49b03ca1…d18436
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 Bitrue, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (April 2023).
- Verify all logic paths related to Hot wallet hack / Access Control are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Access Control 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
Learn to Prevent the Next Bitrue
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