Mad Meerkat Finance Hack

TOTAL LOST $2.0M
Medium Other

Summarize with AI

Affected Chain 2022 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #647 By amount stolen
Auditors 2 Prior security audits

Incident Overview

On May 4, 2022, the front-end of the MM Finance protocol was hacked, which allowed the hacker to change the router address and redirect all the funds of users who somehow interacted with the protocol through the front-end to their wallet.

The exploit lasted approximately three hours, then the team turned off the front-end.

Team members advised users on Discord not to interact with the site.

Attacker address: https://cronoscan.com/address/0xb3065fe2…db9a6b

Attacker fundings address: https://cronoscan.com/address/0x3fbaf5ee…eee7e3. Then they were mapped to: https://crypto.org/explorer/account/cro1ukvuw3qzjtt8wg5hsze4f2c3c8xqvtwgcnxah2. Actual fundings transaction: https://crypto.org/explorer/tx/0C7193F9E2D8FAE789A4B21DBC554D942329A5DA8734541563F339867740527B. This fundings were mapped the 0x address to the underlying address: https://crypto-org-chain.github.io/cronos-address-webtool/

600+ transactions were redirected, and the profits were exchanged for USDT and transferred through the bridge back to ETH before being deposited (743 ETH so far) in Tornado Cash.

Total number of losses: $2M

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Mad Meerkat Finance
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification Exchange (DEX)
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exploit/Other
Affected Token MMF
Official Website mm.finance/
Protocol Twitter/X @MMFcrypto
Team Anonymous
Source Code Verified On-Chain

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
DeFi Governance Hashkey Capital Portfolio Sui Ecosystem MoveVM (MVM) Binance Alpha Binance Alpha Airdrops Binance Ecosystem

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 Mad Meerkat Finance's contract logic - root cause: exchange (dex)
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 Certik, Paladin — still lost $2.0M. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Mad Meerkat Finance, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (May 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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Security Audit History

Bug Bounty Immunefi Details

Sources & References

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