PSYOP Phishing Hack

TOTAL LOST $123K
Low Phishing

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2023 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #1454 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exploit/Phishing Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

PSYOP's users were affected by a phishing attack, and the exploiters stole 122,549 $USD worth of assets.

Details of the Exploit

PSYOP is a BEP20 token trading on UniSwap. The token's creator retweeted another Twitter account that had been compromised. The users were sent to a phishing site and got their funds drained by the exploiter.

Various assets including $PSYOP, $BEN, $WETH, and $UNI were transferred to the malicious address and consequently swapped to $ETH. The stolen funds were distributed between multiple EOA addresses. The total stolen amount reached 122,549 $USD.

The creator of the PSYOP project promised to compensate the full amount to affected users.

Block Data Reference

Attacker address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xFB2E1327…2532D0

Funds transfer transactions:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0xd70aa38c…54d7e3

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x991004f6…8fec0e

https://etherscan.io/tx/0xb67274ff…f199ee

This is classified as a Phishing Attacks . Compare similar hacks →

Incident Report

Protocol / Project PSYOP Phishing
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Phishing
Classification Token
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exploit/Phishing
Affected Token PSYOP
Official Website www.psyop.global/
Protocol Twitter/X @psyopeth
Team Public / Doxxed
Source Code Unverified

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 phishing 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 PSYOP Phishing's contract logic - root cause: token
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 Phishing audit checklist and test coverage

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

  • Verify all logic paths related to Phishing 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 →

Phishing Attacks

Sources & References

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Learn to Prevent the Next PSYOP Phishing

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