Incident Overview
Third-party payment processor EgoPay suffered a hack, which was confirmed in a company's blog post:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150126160707/https://blog.egopay.com/further-egopay-updates/
EgoPay explained: "False values were made available in the merchants platform, when no actual value was transmitted in EgoPay. This hacker then proceeded to convert this fake value into irreversible currencies all within a one-hour window. These merchants believed that this value was in their EgoPay account, but unfortunately it was not."
A number of staff members were then suspended as it was concluded that someone from within the company had perpetrated the hack.
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 EgoPay, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (January 2015).
- 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 EgoPay
The EgoPay 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.