Leo Finance Hack

TOTAL LOST $42K
Low Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2020 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #1757 By amount stolen
Auditors 1 Prior security audit

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

A hacker successfully gained access to the token issuing contract and minted a significant amount of $WLEO token which were subsequently dumped in the Uniswap $WLEO/$ETH liquidity pool, netting the attacker $ 42,000 in ill-gotten funds.

Details of the Exploit

LeoFinance is a  Web3 social platform that leverages blockchain database technology to store content and transactions. LeoFinance enables remuneration possibilities for users that create content or interact with the finance content on the platform. For undisclosed reasons the token issuing contract of LeoFinance was exposed. This means that attackers could mint theirselves token, hereby completely changing the supply side of the tokenomics and dump the price of the $WLEO token.

Eventually an attacker used the access to the mint() function, which was successfully invoked at the following example transactions:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0e8621db…5c05c8

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x9c0abb76…44f66e

The attack could have yielded more returns for the hacker if the community had not taken notice and withdrawn liquidity from the pool almost instantly as the hack was taking place. The prices of the $WLEO token took an initial hit of 60% but the price recovered later on.

Block Data Reference

The attacker's address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x8c9a02c8…9a2495

Minted tokens were sold on Uniswap in a bunch of transactions:

https://bloxy.info/txs/references_address/0x8c9a02c8…9a2495?argument=to&signature_id=1102188

Incident Report

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

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Liquid Staking
Affected Token WLEO
Official Website leofinance.io/
Protocol Twitter/X @financeleo
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 Leo Finance's contract logic - root cause: other
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 $42K. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Leo Finance, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (February 2020).

  • 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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