Incident Overview
On October 27th, an attacker exploited the friesDAO contracts, taking control of the deployer address through a profanity attack vector and drained the treasury of its USDC, resulting in a loss of 2,138,705.403949 USDC, and drained the FRIES tokens in the staking contract and sold them through Uniswap, extracting 120.128930112550592565 ETH ($189,954.761991 at the time).
The friesDAO contracts were deployed by one address, which had not transferred ownership of the contracts to a different address such as multisig after deployment. The attacker was able to exploit the contracts by brute-forcing the private key using profanity's vulnerabilities, which reduced the possibilities of private keys due to flaws in generation, and gained control of the deployer contract. The first part of the attack drained all of the USDC from the treasury by swapping it to a bit of FRIES tokens, setting the manual, fixed refund rate variable to a high number, changing the merkle root whitelist of the NFT, and refunded the small bit of purchased FRIES token for the entire treasury’s USDC.
The second part took all of the FRIES out of the staking pool, then sold them through Uniswap to extract USDC from the liquidity pool.
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 friesDAO, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2022).
- 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 TrialSecurity Audit History
- Audit Report 1 Report
Related Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
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