Incident Overview
Nebula Revelation's staking contract suffered a reentrancy attack, resulting in a loss of 180,264 USD worth 81.3 WETH.
Nebula Revelation, a Web3 space-themed open-world game on Optimism, experienced a reentrancy attack on its staking contract on January 25, 2024. The root cause of the exploit was a lack of reentrancy protection in the withdrawal function of their contracts.Root cause: the withdrawNFL() did not have re-entry protection. The attacker used a self-destructing contract to complete all operations in one transaction, exploiting the security vulnerability.
The stolen funds, amounting to 180,264 USD worth 81.3 WETH, were transferred and bridged to the Ethereum chain.
Attacker Address:
https://optimism.etherscan.io/address/0x1fd0a6a5…c4ef12
Malicious Transaction:
https://optimism.etherscan.io/tx/0xf4fc3b63…5b2328
Malicious Contract Address:
https://optimism.etherscan.io/address/0xE4D41BDD…91087b
Self Destruct Contract Address:
https://optimism.etherscan.io/address/0xfc3b0855…9bBa4C
Hop Protocol, Bridged Transaction:
https://optimism.etherscan.io/tx/0x48beb06d…6e99cb
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 Nebula Revelation, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (January 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Reentrancy are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Reentrancy attack class for patterns
- Check that all state-changing functions follow the Checks-Effects-Interactions (CEI) pattern to prevent reentrancy and logic ordering bugs
- 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
- 01
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02
Web Archive https://archive.ph/zN3K9
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