Incident Overview
In July 2019, Singapore-based CoinTiger exchange admitted that cybercriminals had stolen a cold wallet, that contained over 400 million Proton Tokens (PTT). It was subsequently able to lock the wallet that contained the stolen PTT. Unfortunately, by the time it located the wallet, 120 million PTT had already been traded out.
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 CoinTiger, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (August 2019).
- 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 CoinTiger
The CoinTiger 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.