Concentric Hack

TOTAL LOST $1.7M
Medium Private Key Compromised (Social Engineering) / Access Control arbitrum

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain arbitrum Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #697 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exploit/Access control Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Concentric Finance, a yield aggregator on Arbitrum, exploited via social engineering attack, losing $1,654,517 worth 715.7 WETH.

Details of the Exploit

Concentric Finance is a yield aggregator project running on the Arbitrum chain. On January 22, 2024, the project suffered a severe security breach due to a targeted social engineering attack on one of the team members holding the deployer wallet. The attacker compromised the private key for the protocol's deployer account and used it to upgrade the vaults, mint new LP tokens, and subsequently drain the vaults of their assets, resulting in a loss of approximately $1,654,517 worth 715.7 WETH.

Block Data Reference

Attacker Address:

https://arbiscan.io/address/0x105f52fc…14E4A1

Funds Holders as of Jan 23, 2024:

https://arbiscan.io/address/0x17865c33…f94c34

https://arbiscan.io/address/0x1F14E386…fbC42d

https://arbiscan.io/address/0xFD681A9a…C76030

https://arbiscan.io/address/0x5c0E945F…532AEc

Malicious Transactions:

https://arbiscan.io/tx/0x00554de1…e43bcd

https://arbiscan.io/tx/0xc2c73baf…cdd982

https://arbiscan.io/tx/0x146d7af4…5f5f1f

https://arbiscan.io/tx/0xd9036566…558e3b

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

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Concentric
Date of Incident
Affected Chain(s) arbitrum
Attack Technique Private Key Compromised (Social Engineering) / Access Control
Classification Infrastructure / Yield Aggregator
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exploit/Access control
Affected Token CONE
Smart Contract Language Solidity
Official Website www.concentric.fi/
Protocol Twitter/X @ConcentricFi
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 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 Concentric'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? Hard to catch — private key / OpSec failures are outside smart contract audit scope

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Concentric, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (January 2024).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Private Key Compromised (Social Engineering) / 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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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 Phishing Attacks

Sources & References

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