PeopleDAO Hack

TOTAL LOST $120K
Low Social Engineering ethereum

Summarize with AI

Affected Chain ethereum Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #1467 By amount stolen
Year 2023 Incident year

Incident Overview

PeopleCoin (MEN) is a cryptocurrency . Users are able to generate MEN through the process of mining. PeopleCoin has a current supply of 750,231,505.0331 with 0 in circulation.

The last known price of PeopleCoin is 0.0000865 USD and is up 0.00 over the last 24 hours. More information can be found at https://www.peoplecoin.pw/.

Incident Report

Protocol / Project PeopleDAO
Date of Incident
Affected Chain(s) ethereum
Attack Technique Social Engineering
Classification Infrastructure
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Official Website www.peoplecoin.pw/

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
Mineable

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 social engineering and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with ethereum smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in PeopleDAO's contract logic - root cause: infrastructure
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 Social Engineering audit checklist and test coverage

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

  • Verify all logic paths related to Social Engineering 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.

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Related Attack Classes

The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:

See all Phishing Attacks examples →

Sources & References

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