Incident Overview
On March 13, 2025, the $MAID token suffered a private key leak, allowing an attacker to mint 0x10000000000000000000000000 MAID tokens and swap them for 89 ETH ($166K). The deployer wallet was also drained, increasing the total loss to 101 ETH ($190K). Funds were dispersed to four different addresses.
The attacker used the compromised deployer wallet to mint 0x10000000000000000000000000 MAID tokens and immediately swapped them for 89 ETH ($166K). Additionally, the deployer wallet held 12.4 ETH, which was also drained, bringing the total stolen amount to 101 ETH ($190K). The stolen funds were distributed across four different addresses for further obfuscation.
This incident highlights the critical importance of securing deployer and multisig keys, implementing timelocks or additional security layers for minting functions, and actively monitoring wallet activity to detect suspicious transactions early. There has been no official response from the $MAID team regarding fund recovery or mitigation actions.
Incident Report
Protocol Information
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 MAID, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (March 2025).
- 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
Learn to Prevent the Next MAID
The MAID hack is one of many attacks that skilled auditors are trained to detect before deployment. Master real exploit patterns and defense techniques with hands-on Web3 security training.