Health Hack

TOTAL LOST $9K
Low Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2022 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #1949 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exploit/Other Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Price of the HEALTH token in a Uniswap pool was manipulated allowing the attacker to take a 33 BNB profit.

Details of the Exploit

The exploit was possible due to a bug in the internal _tranfer() function of the token contract that was causing decrease of HEALTH in the pool.

The attack was performed in three transactions. Each transaction involved the following steps:

1. Taking a flash loan of 40 WBNB;

2. Exchanging the borrowed amount to HEALTH;

3. Calling 999 token transfers with 0 value. Due to the bug in _transfer(), the number of HEALTH in the pool decreased each time, hence the token price was increasing.

4. Exchanging the inflated HEALTH token to WBNB with profit.

5. Paying back the flashloan

Block Data Reference

The attacker contract:

https://bscscan.com/address/0x80e5fc0d…1ea2d4

The attack transactions:

https://bscscan.com/tx/0xae8ca9dc…c66ccf

https://bscscan.com/tx/0x780f7128…e0266a

https://bscscan.com/tx/0x0daad55e…a3a462

Incident Report

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

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exploit/Other
Affected Token HEALTH
Team Anonymous
Source Code Verified On-Chain

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 Health's contract logic - root cause: token
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

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Health, 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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Sources & References

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