Incident Overview
On May 8th, the team behind fake Lifeform executed an exit scam, making a profit of approximately $250,000 USD.
On May 8th, the fake Lifeform token was rug-pulled. The deployer exploited a backdoor by calling the removeLimits() function on the token contract, allowing them to mint unlimited tokens while selling. A total of 1,603,040,060,640,000 tokens were swapped for 81.2 ETH and dispersed across different addresses.
Scammer:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xb57b3644…7638fe
removeLimits() call:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x302727f3…aa7e1f
Sell:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x9c69a064…c18143
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 Lifeform (fake), these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (May 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Rugpull 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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