MutantNFTs Hack

TOTAL LOST $25K
Low Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2023 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #1860 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exploit/Other Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

The Lab from Mutants is an NFT staking platform that was exploited with a profit of about $25k USD.

Details of the Exploit

The recent attack involved using stake keys from various users in a payment address controlled by the attacker, creating Franken addresses. This allowed the attacker to trick our Token Reward Claim validation and claim rewards belonging to other users. Our vulnerability was relying on a simple comparison of stake addresses to determine reward claim eligibility.

The attacker was limited to exploiting only eligible rewards and did not impact tokens in our Treasury wallet. The exact method used to obtain other users' reward information is unknown, but it's believed to involve examining addresses engaging with our Raffles/Stakes contracts and querying our API.

Block Data Reference

Exploited claims list was provided by Mutants team:

https://mutants-assets.fra1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/others/spoof-attack-hashes.txt

Incident Report

Protocol / Project MutantNFTs
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification NFT
Primary Source View Post-Mortem #1 View Post-Mortem #2

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exploit/Other
Official Website labs.mutant-nft.com/
Protocol Twitter/X @MutantNFTs
Team Anonymous
Source Code Unverified

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 other and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in MutantNFTs's contract logic - root cause: nft
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? Likely — with a thorough Other audit checklist and test coverage

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to MutantNFTs, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (January 2023).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation
  • Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs

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Sources & References

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