Incident Overview
Crypto payments provider CoinsPaid suffered a $37 million heist orchestrated by North Korea's Lazarus Group. The attack involved six months of social engineering, culminating in an employee being manipulated via a deceptive job offer.
The $37 million heist on CoinsPaid was executed by North Korea's Lazarus Group through a sophisticated campaign spanning six months. The attack focused on social engineering tactics, with hackers relentlessly targeting CoinsPaid's team members. The campaign involved spam, phishing, fake job offers, and bribery attempts.
The climax of the attack occurred on July 22 when an employee, believing they were being interviewed for a job with Crypto.com, unwittingly downloaded malicious software as part of a technical test. The hackers leveraged their extensive research on CoinsPaid, including its team structure, to create a convincing story that exploited the employee's trust.
Upon infiltrating the system, the hackers exploited a software vulnerability to gain authorized access to CoinsPaid's hot wallets. While they couldn't directly access private keys, they successfully withdrew most of the funds to decentralized exchanges like SwftSwap, SunSwap, and SimpleSwap. Funds were also routed through mixers to obscure their movement.
CoinsPaid emphasized the necessity of employee training to recognize social engineering tactics and the significance of recognizing seemingly insignificant hack attempts as potential precursors to larger operations. Despite impacting the company's revenue, no customer funds were lost.
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 CoinsPaid, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (July 2023).
- Verify all logic paths related to Social Engineering / Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Phishing 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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