Incident Overview
LianGo Protocol was exploited via access control. The attacker compromised private keys and was able to receive $LGT tokens from the project's pool for roughly 1,600,000 $USD
LianGo Protocol is a decentralized consume-as-mine payment protocol. The project has multiple contracts such as $LGT token contract and LGT Pool. The deployer address of the protocol was compromised, which allowed the exploiter to add a malicious pool to the Pool contract, and drain $LGT tokens worth about 1,600,000 $USD.
The stolen tokens were sold on the PancakeSwap which affected the $LGT token price, which has dropped 97%.
Attacker address:
https://bscscan.com/address/0x36d17393…38c28a
Malicious transactions:
https://bscscan.com/tx/0xbdd83d5d…073953
https://bscscan.com/tx/0x29c29e9f…1e67d6
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 LianGo Protocol, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (February 2023).
- Verify all logic paths related to Access Control 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
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
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