Black Hole Hack

TOTAL LOST $1.3M
Medium Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2023 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #782 By amount stolen
Auditors 1 Prior security audit

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Black Hole token suffered a price manipulation attack on Oct 11, 2023, resulting in a loss of 1,275,981 USDT.

Details of the Exploit

Black Hole (BH) is a BEP20 token on Binance Smart Chain. On Oct 11, 2023, BH token was exploited through a price manipulation attack. The attacker used a flashloan to target the BH/USDT trading pair on PancakeSwap.

By swapping USDT for BH at a low price and extracting liquidity at a higher price, the attacker drained an estimated 1,275,981 USDT from the exchange. The attack was executed with approximately 4.16 USD in fees on the BNB Chain. Following the attack, the attacker transferred their profits to Tornado Cash to avoid being traced and frozen.

Block Data Reference

Attacker Address:

https://bscscan.com/address/0xfdbfceea…a63464

Malicious Transaction:

https://bscscan.com/tx/0xc11e4020…007662

Malicious Contract Address:

https://bscscan.com/address/0x216ccfd4…76480c

TornadoCash Deposit Transaction Example:

https://bscscan.com/tx/0x807c3971…98b288

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Black Hole
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification Token
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Yield
Affected Token BH
Official Website blackhole.xyz/
Protocol Twitter/X @BlackWhaleDeFi
Team Anonymous
Source Code Unverified

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
Avalanche Ecosystem
Protocol Links
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 Black Hole's contract logic - root cause: token
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 $1.3M. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Black Hole, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2023).

  • 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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