PancakeHunny Hack

TOTAL LOST $2.0M
Medium Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2021 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #670 By amount stolen
Auditors 1 Prior security audit

Incident Overview

The attacker's address:

https://bscscan.com/address/0x731821d1…917689

The contract used for the attack:

https://bscscan.com/address/0xa5312796…708e71

The attacker:

- took a 53.25 BTC flash loan from Cream Finance

- used 53.25 BTC to get a 2,717,107 TUSD loan from Venus

- manipulated the price of BNB/TUSD Pool on PancakeSwap

- used 50 different contracts, deployed earlier to deposit 38,250 TUSD into HUNNY TUSD Vault

- redeemed 2842.16TUSD and minted 12,020.40 Hunny

- sold minted Hunny for 7.78 WBNB

-repeated with 50 wallets 26 times.

The hack is made possible by a profit inflation flaw that transforms a little number of harvested ALPACA into a big sum of TUSD for staking. These converted TUSDs are then counted as profit, which is subsequently inflated to produce a big quantity of HUNNY.

Stolen funds were bridged on Ethereum blockchain and deposited into Tornado Cash mixer:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x731821d1…917689

Incident Report

Protocol / Project PancakeHunny
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification Yield Aggregator
Primary Source View Post-Mortem #1 View Post-Mortem #2

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exploit/Other
Affected Token HUNNY
Official Website pancakehunny.finance/
Protocol Twitter/X @PancakeHunny

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
DeFi Yield Aggregator BNB Chain Ecosystem
Protocol Links
GitHub

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 PancakeHunny's contract logic - root cause: yield aggregator
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
Audited by Certik — still lost $2.0M. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to PancakeHunny, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2021).

  • 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

Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.

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Security Audit History

Sources & References

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