Incident Overview
In September 2017, there was an accident where coins stored in the hot wallet of the Coinis service were withdrawn by external hacking. After recognizing the situation, an emergency convened all employees to additionally prevent withdrawals due to external hacking, and security measures such as changing the system access password were implemented.
The total amount of damage due to this hack is about 2.1 billion won as of the closing price of September 22, about 508 BTC were withdrawn in total.
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 Coinis, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (September 2017).
- 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
Learn to Prevent the Next Coinis
The Coinis hack is one of many attacks that skilled auditors are trained to detect before deployment. Master real exploit patterns and defense techniques with hands-on Web3 security training.