Incident Overview
Mintpal faced a major hack on the 13th of July, causing 8,000,000 Vericoin to be stolen (value $2,000,000), which was about 30% of the circulating supply at the time. The exchange had kept their Vericoin on a “hot” wallet (an online, internet-connected wallet), which is much more vulnerable.
Interestingly enough, the Bitcoin and Litecoin wallets were also targeted for the Mintpal hack. This turned out unsuccessful. The exchange had wisely decided to move these to a “cold” wallet (an offline wallet).
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 MintPal, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (July 2014).
- 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 MintPal
The MintPal 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.