FTX Hack

TOTAL LOST $187K
Low Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2022 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #1326 By amount stolen
Auditors 1 Prior security audit

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

FTX was exploited due to gas limit vulnerability which caused mint of $XEN tokens at zero cost.

Details of the Exploit

FTX is a centralized crypto exchange. FTX provides an opportunity for performing fee-free withdrawals. The hacker deployed a smart contract with unverified source code to exploit the vulnerability and was able to mint $XEN tokens with zero cost 17,000 times.

FTX lost roughly 81 $ETH due to gas stealing, and 61 $ETH worth of $XEN tokens were minted and swapped through UniSwap. The price of the $XEN token dropped by 33% after an incident.

Block Data Reference

Attacker address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x6b01f9f4…b9b831

Malicious contracts:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x6438162e…324a3d

https://etherscan.io/address/0x56af41c4…3dcf45

Malicious transaction:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0xfb1a7b35…e3107d

Incident Report

Protocol / Project FTX
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification CeFi
Primary Source View Post-Mortem #1 View Post-Mortem #2

Protocol Information

Protocol Type NFT Marketplace
Affected Token FTT
Official Website ftx.com/
Protocol Twitter/X @FTX_Official
Team Public / Doxxed
Source Code Verified On-Chain

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
Asset Management Marketplace Enterprise Solutions Real World Assets Protocols
Protocol Links
GitHub

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.

Technical Knowledge Deep understanding of other and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in FTX's contract logic - root cause: cefi
Execution Speed Precise transaction ordering and timing to exploit the vulnerability within a single atomic block
Obfuscation Plan A strategy to launder and move stolen funds - typically through mixers, cross-chain bridges, or decentralized DEX swaps to resist tracing

What Auditors Should Check

Could this have been caught in audit? Likely — with a thorough Other audit checklist and test coverage
Audited by Audit Report 1 — still lost $187K. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to FTX, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2022).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Other 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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Security Audit History

Sources & References

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