Journey of Awakening Hack

TOTAL LOST $127K
Low Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2022 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #1446 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exploit/Other Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Journey of Awakening project was exploited for the total amount of 127,000 $USD. The attacker exploited the vault contract of the project with unverified source code.

Details of the Exploit

Journey of Awakening is BEP20 token trading on PancakeSwap. The project token $ATK price dropped by more than 99% after the attacker drained liquidity with stolen tokens. The exploiter used deployed smart contract to withdraw $ATK tokens from the vault contract with an unverified source code and profited 127,000 $USD in total.

Block Data Reference

Attacker address:

https://bscscan.com/address/0x3df6cd58…afbb4f

Malicious contract:

https://bscscan.com/address/0xd7ba198c…750231

Liquidity removal transaction:

https://bscscan.com/tx/0x601b8ab0…f99c32

Malicious transaction:

https://bscscan.com/tx/0x55983d87…2112cd

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Journey of Awakening
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification Token
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exploit/Other
Affected Token ATK
Team Anonymous
Source Code Unverified

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 Journey of Awakening'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 Journey of Awakening, 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

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Sources & References

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