Mirror Hack

TOTAL LOST $90.0M
High #84 All-Time Outdated Oracle Exploit / Duplicate Call Exploit terra

Summarize with AI

Affected Chain terra Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #84 By amount stolen
Auditors 1 Prior security audit

Incident Overview

Synthetics protocol for on-chain price exposure to real-world assets - accessible to all.

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Mirror
Date of Incident
Affected Chain(s) terra
Attack Technique Outdated Oracle Exploit / Duplicate Call Exploit
Classification Infrastructure / Smart Contract Language
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Derivatives
Smart Contract Language Rust
Protocol Twitter/X @mirror_protocol

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Technical Knowledge Deep understanding of outdated oracle exploit / duplicate call exploit and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with terra smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in Mirror's contract logic - root cause: infrastructure / smart contract language
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? Yes — skilled auditors routinely flag Outdated Oracle Exploit / Duplicate Call Exploit vulnerabilities in code review
Audited by Audit Report 1 — still lost $90.0M. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Mirror, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2021).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Outdated Oracle Exploit / Duplicate Call Exploit are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Oracle Manipulation & Price Manipulation attack class for patterns
  • Audit oracle price feeds for manipulation risks - ensure time-weighted average prices (TWAPs) or multi-source aggregators are used, not spot prices
  • 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.

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Security Audit History

Related Attack Classes

The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:

See all Oracle Manipulation & Price Manipulation examples →

Sources & References

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