Incident Overview
The exploiter's address:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xdcc8a38a…952c28
The Build Finance DAO has been the victim of a hostile governance takeover in which a malicious actor proposed and was successful in gaining control of the Build token contract.
The proposal was made by a wallet named Suho.eth but it was failed.
However, it appears that the exploiter transferred their governance tokens to another wallet and attempted again. This idea, however, was not picked up by the bot on the Discord server. This idea seemed to go ignored until it was passed on February 10th.
The attacker exploited their newly acquired access over the DAO and its token minting capabilities to generate 1.1 million BUILD tokens for himself. They drained the liquidity pools on two decentralized exchanges, Balancer and Uniswap. Following that, they removed 130,000 METRIC tokens from the project's treasury, sold them, and minted 1 billion BUILD tokens additionally.
After, the exploiter deposited stolen funds into the Tornado Cash mixer
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 BuildFinance, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (February 2022).
- Verify all logic paths related to 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
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