Incident Overview
Monkey Drainer phishing group announced on their Telegram about shutting down the service. The total stolen amount reached 16,506,602 $USD.
Monkey Drainer is a crypto scam service, that provides phishing smart contracts. The Monkey hacker announced they shut down the service, deleting all files immediately. The total stolen amount reached 16,506,602 $USD according to SlowMist.
The service provided malicious smart contracts with unverified source code to drain the wallets of affected users, including native coins, ERC20 tokens, and NFTs on various chains like Ethereum, Binance, Avalanche and etc. Monkey Drainer took 30% of the stolen funds from the scammers as payment.
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 Monkey Drainer, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (March 2023).
- Verify all logic paths related to Phishing are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Phishing 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 Monkey Drainer
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