CoinDash Hack

TOTAL LOST $12.2M
High Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2017 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #282 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exploit/Other Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

CoinDash's ICO was compromised, leading to the theft of $7 million in Ethereum.

Details of the Exploit

CoinDash, a cryptocurrency portfolio management platform based in Israel, was set to launch its Initial Coin Offering (ICO). However, during the event, an attacker changed the CoinDash wallet address posted on the CoinDash website to one they owned. This led to the theft of millions in Ethereum, estimated at the time to be around $7 million.

Investors were promised their funds, not in their original cryptocurrency, but in the CoinDash event token. In a surprising turn of events, the attacker returned 10,000 ETH in September and a further 20,000 ETH later. These transactions can be viewed through the CoinDash public wallet.

Block Data Reference

Compromised Address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x6a164122…c0ae48

Transaction of Returned ETH:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x39ae8444…520aea

Incident Report

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

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exploit/Other
Official Website coindash.io/
Protocol Twitter/X @coindashio
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 CoinDash's contract logic - root cause: other
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 CoinDash, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (July 2017).

  • 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

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Sources & References

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