Incident Overview
On September 16, 2024, DeFi platform Delta Prime suffered a breach, resulting in a loss of approximately $6 million in stablecoins, which the attacker swiftly swapped to ETH.
The attack began with a suspicious address draining pools on Delta Prime, initially stealing around $4.5 million worth of USDC. The attacker quickly swapped these assets to Ethereum, but another wave of malicious transactions increased the total stolen to nearly $6 million. Onchain security firm Cyvers suggested that the exploit was caused by the loss of control over Delta Prime's admin wallet.
The hacker gained access to the wallet’s private key, allowing them to modify Delta Prime’s proxy contracts. This upgrade pointed the contracts to a malicious one, enabling the attacker to drain liquidity pools on the Arbitrum chain.
Incident Report
Protocol Information
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 DeltaPrime, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (September 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Private Key Compromised (Unknown Method) / 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 DeltaPrime
The DeltaPrime 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.