Huobi Hack

TOTAL LOST $26.4M
High #190 All-Time Private Key Compromised (Unknown Method) ethereum

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain ethereum Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #190 By amount stolen
Year 2023 Incident year

Incident Overview

Kurobi (KURO) is a cryptocurrency and operates on the Solana platform. Kurobi has a current supply of 400,000,000 with 0 in circulation. The last known price of Kurobi is 0.0000111 USD and is up 4.45 over the last 24 hours.

It is currently trading on 5 active market(s) with $10.37 traded over the last 24 hours. More information can be found at https://kurobi.io/.

This is classified as a Access Control Attacks . Compare similar hacks →

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Huobi
Date of Incident
Affected Chain(s) ethereum
Attack Technique Private Key Compromised (Unknown Method)
Classification Infrastructure
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Official Website kurobi.io/
Protocol Twitter/X @kurobi_io

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
Solana Ecosystem
Protocol Links
GitHub Reddit Telegram

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 Operational-security tradecraft (phishing, malware, leaked seed phrases, or insider access) to obtain treasury signing authority
Capital Required Minimal capital - only enough to cover gas while draining the compromised accounts
On-Chain Access Valid signing authority over the compromised wallets / multisig signers, allowing direct transfer of funds or stake authorization
Target Reconnaissance Identification of Huobi's high-value treasury accounts and the authority / multisig structure controlling them
Execution Speed Speed to drain the compromised accounts before the team detects the breach and revokes signing authority or freezes the assets
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? Hard to catch — private key / OpSec failures are outside smart contract audit scope

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Huobi, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (November 2023).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Private Key Compromised (Unknown Method) 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

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Related Attack Classes

The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:

See all Access Control Attacks examples →

Access Control Attacks

Sources & References

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