Incident Overview
CS token's pool was exploited via a flash loan attack. The attacker used 80,000,000 $USD to manipulate the token price and made a profit of 714,285 $USD.
CS is a BEP20 token trading on PancakeSwap. The token's CS/USD pool was drained via a flash loan attack. The attack started from the malicious contract deployment by the exploiter, which took 80,000,000 $USD as a flash loan from the BSC-USD pool.
Consequently, multiple swaps with a small amount of 5,000 $USD was continuously repeated to manipulate the pool's price. After reaching some conditions, the attacker could swap the $CS tokens back with an unfairly high price and the total amount gained back went to 80,954,285 $USD. 240,000 $USD were paid back to the BSC-USD pool as a flash loan fee after the base amount was returned.
The exploiter's profit reached 714,285 $USD, which was transferred to the initial EOA, and then distributed between several addresses. All the malicious actions were performed in a single transaction.
Attacker address:
https://bscscan.com/address/0x2cdeee96…4027ba
Malicious transaction:
https://bscscan.com/tx/0x906394b2…87baa4
Malicious contract:
https://bscscan.com/address/0x90fa57d2…6ee2e3
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 CS, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (May 2023).
- Verify all logic paths related to Flash Loan Attack are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Flash Loans 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 CS
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