CityDAO Hack

TOTAL LOST $95K
Low Access Control

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2022 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #1515 By amount stolen
Auditors 1 Prior security audit

Incident Overview

CityDAO, an Ethereum-based community blockchain city project, has posted that the CityDAO Discord administrator account has been hacked. 29.67 ETH ($95,000) funds were stolen by hackers using stolen admin accounts to post fake land airdrop messages. The attacked administrator, "Lyons800," tweeted that the attack was a "ridiculous security breach from Discord."

https://twitter.com/Lyons_800/status/1480909318832721924

This is classified as a Access Control Attacks . Compare similar hacks →

Incident Report

Protocol / Project CityDAO
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Access Control
Classification Other
Primary Source View Post-Mortem #1 View Post-Mortem #2

Protocol Information

Protocol Type RWA
Official Website www.citydao.io/
Protocol Twitter/X @CityDAO
Team Anonymous
Source Code Unverified

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
DAO Ethereum Ecosystem Governance DragonFly Capital Portfolio Fenbushi Capital Portfolio Pantera Capital Portfolio Spartan Group FTX Bankruptcy Estate
Protocol Links

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 Operational-security tradecraft (phishing, malware, leaked seed phrases, or insider access) to obtain treasury signing authority
Capital Required Minimal capital - only enough to cover gas while draining the compromised accounts
On-Chain Access Valid signing authority over the compromised wallets / multisig signers, allowing direct transfer of funds or stake authorization
Target Reconnaissance Identification of CityDAO's high-value treasury accounts and the authority / multisig structure controlling them
Execution Speed Speed to drain the compromised accounts before the team detects the breach and revokes signing authority or freezes the assets
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 Access Control audit checklist and test coverage
Audited by Audit Report 1 — still lost $95K. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

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

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Security Audit History

Related Attack Classes

The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:

See all Access Control Attacks examples →

Access Control Attacks

Sources & References

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