Incident Overview
On December 10, 2025, Binance co-CEO Yi He's WeChat account was compromised and used to promote the MUBARA memecoin in a pump-and-dump scheme, with attackers purchasing approximately 21.16 million MUBARA tokens for 19,479 USDT, then offloading 11.95 million tokens for 43,520 USDT after creating artificial demand through the false endorsement from the high-profile account, netting approximately $55,000 in profits with 9.21 million tokens (~$31,000) still held.
The attack was a social engineering exploit rather than a smart contract vulnerability, where hackers gained control of Yi He's WeChat account by taking over the phone number tied to it, preventing her from regaining access. The attackers used two newly created wallets to accumulate MUBARA tokens across PancakeSwap and related DEX routes before the fake endorsement was circulated through WeChat channels. As the fraudulent message spread appearing to come from Binance's newly appointed co-CEO (less than a week after her elevation), trading volume and price spiked sharply on decentralized exchanges, allowing the attackers to sell into the artificial demand.
The exploit followed a classic pump-and-dump pattern.
Incident Report
Protocol Information
Market Context at Time of Hack
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 MUBARA, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (December 2025).
- 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
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