Incident Overview
On October 3, 2024, an unknown lending project on the Arbitrum network suffered a $130,000 loss due to a price oracle manipulation attack involving the WETH-USDC liquidity pool.
The hacker exploited the lending protocol's reliance on a price feed from the UniswapV3Pool to manipulate the value of WETH-USDC LP tokens. Initially, the price of the LP tokens was 5,826,926,145,978,180, but after manipulation, the price jumped to 8,131,590,584,988,874. The attacker first deposited LP tokens, then deposited USDC and borrowed additional LP tokens.
During the borrowing, the price of the tokens was artificially low, but the attacker manipulated it to rise, allowing them to withdraw all the LP tokens from the pool.
Transaction Hash: 0xb5cfa4ae…947216
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 N/A, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Oracle Issue 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.
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 N/A
The N/A 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.