Incident Overview
PlantWorld was exploited by a flash loan attack. The hacker profited for 24483 $USD.
PlantWorld is BEP20 token trading on PancakeSwap and can't be confused with other tokens with the same PLTD symbol. The attacker took 666,000 $BUSD as a flash loan and bought 1,570,000 $PLTD tokens using a smart contract with an unverified source code. Consequently, $PLTD tokens were used to manipulate inner variables and a large amount of additional $PLTD was used to drain the liquidity from the Pancake pool.
The attacker was able to withdraw 690,000 $BUSD and profited for 24,483 $BUSD.
Attacker address:
https://bscscan.com/address/0x6ded5927…e93c5b
Malicious contract:
https://bscscan.com/address/0x83797825…d48b49
Malicious transaction:
https://bscscan.com/tx/0x8385625e…0dafe0
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 PlantWorld, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2022).
- Verify all logic paths related to Flash Loan Attack are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Flash Loans 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.
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 PlantWorld
The PlantWorld 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.