Incident Overview
Pump.fun Exploited for ~$2M. 12,300 $SOL were stolen from its contracts, reportedly by project's former team member who had a private key to the service and executed a flash loan attack.
Pump.Fun, a memecoin launchpad, was exploited today through a flashloan attack, resulting in the theft of at least 12,300 SOL, worth roughly $2 million. The attacker leveraged a compromised private key to execute the exploit, where Pump.Fun’s service account cosigned the malicious transactions. Using flashloans from MarginFi, the hacker withdrew liquidity meant to be migrated to Raydium and repaid the flashloan, also donating leftover funds to Solana token holders.
The Pump.Fun team managed to upgrade their contracts to prevent further damage and assured that all user wallets and existing tokens on Raydium are secure. Trading on Pump.Fun was temporarily paused but has since resumed, and affected users will receive full liquidity restitution within 24 hours. The platform accused a former employee of exploiting their privileged position to access the withdraw authority, compromising the protocol’s internal systems.
The incident has been reported to law enforcement, and the investigation continues.
Incident Report
Protocol Information
Market Context at Time of Hack
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 pump.fun, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (May 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Private Key Compromised (Unknown Method) / Flash Loan Attack are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Access Control 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
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