Incident Overview
In October 2024, CryptoBottle on Polygon was exploited three times, resulting in total losses of approximately $527k.
The Navigator’s Adventage contract allowed users to acquire NAS tokens through minting or swapping, controlled by the fixedPriceEnabled variable. However, public functions permitted anyone to toggle this variable. The attacker set fixedPriceEnabled to true, enabling the mint function and disabling the balance check in swap(). They conducted swaps where 1 USDT was exchanged for millions of NAS tokens. After accumulating NAS, they toggled fixedPriceEnabled back to false, sold the tokens, and drained the USDT liquidity.
The attacker ultimately transferred 493,652 USDT to a wallet linked to a prior CryptoBottle exploit on October 22. The funds remain in that wallet at the time of reporting.
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 CryptoBottle, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (February 2024).
- 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
Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.
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