Incident Overview
On December 17, 2024, GemPad suffered a security breach that impacted a small number of projects. The team immediately responded, working with security experts to identify and mitigate the vulnerability. As a precaution, the Locker feature has been temporarily disabled until a contract upgrade is implemented.
An attacker breached GemPad’s security locks, affecting certain projects. The vulnerability has since been fully mitigated, ensuring that no further projects can be compromised. The Locker contract remains temporarily unavailable while the team works on a complete contract upgrade to reinforce security.
GemPad is actively reaching out to affected projects to provide support.
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 GemPad, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (December 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Reentrancy / Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Reentrancy attack class for patterns
- Check that all state-changing functions follow the Checks-Effects-Interactions (CEI) pattern to prevent reentrancy and logic ordering bugs
- 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
- 01
- 02
Learn to Prevent the Next GemPad
The GemPad 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.