Bored Ape Yacht Club Hack

TOTAL LOST $13.0M
High Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2022 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #273 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exploit/Other Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) users were scammed by a fraudulent link, leading to a loss of over $1 million in NFTs.

Details of the Exploit

A hacker posted a fraudulent link to a clone of the BAYC website with a fake airdrop, prompting users to sign a 'safeTransferFrom' transaction. As a result, their assets were transferred to the scammer's wallet. The stolen Apes, based on the most recent sale price, are valued well into the six figures.

The total worth of the four stolen Apes is well over $1 million. The scammer sold the NFTs mostly on LooksRare and accumulated a total net worth of 765 ETH, which were then transferred to an external wallet.

Block Data Reference

Scammer Address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x8c793461…89b9a9

Malicious Transaction:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x5ab817de…f338ad

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Bored Ape Yacht Club
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification NFT
Primary Source View Post-Mortem #1 View Post-Mortem #2 View Post-Mortem #3

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exploit/Other
Official Website boredapeyachtclub.com/
Protocol Twitter/X @BoredApeYC
Team Anonymous
Source Code Unverified

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 Bored Ape Yacht Club's contract logic - root cause: nft
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

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Bored Ape Yacht Club, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (April 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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Sources & References

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