Incident Overview
Anti-scam vigilance War on Rugs, a self-described collection of smart contract auditors and blockchain developers, offered itself as a resource for verifying the credentials of a DeFi project, warning of projects it deemed insecure.
Later, War or Rugs created their own token - Fairmoon, which is the clone of the Safemoon. After the token launch, some insider wallets bought FAIRMOON before War on Rugs audit on some over $40k, which later were dumped and brought $1,800,00 of profit:
https://bscscan.com/token/0xfe75cD11…06cef6?a=0x485d2f76…d0373c
To calm down the community, the project announced migration to a new token. However, Shappy aka WarOnRugs completed his 2nd exit scam and again ran away with at least 1,170 BNB ($500,000 at this point). The total amount by which the community was defrauded thus amounts to at least $2,300,000.
The transaction of the second rug pull:
https://bscscan.com/tx/0xef7cff7b…4fccc3
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 Fairmoon, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (May 2021).
- Verify all logic paths related to Rugpull 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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The Fairmoon 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.