Incident Overview
QuadrigaCS owes its customers approximately 190,000,000 $USD.
According to a court petition, the troubled Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX owes its clients $190 million and is unable to access the majority of the assets.
Jennifer Robertson, the widow of QuadrigaCX founder Gerald Cotten, stated in a signed document filed Jan. 31 with the Nova Scotia Supreme Court that the exchange owes its clients around $250 million CAD ($190 million) in both bitcoin and cash. The firm previously declared on its website that it had filed for creditor protection, but the document itself reveals further information about its plight.
According to the petition, there were around 115,000 individuals with balances signed up on the exchange as of January 31, 2019, with $70 million CAD in fiat and $180 million CAD in crypto owing altogether.
Cotten reportedly died of Crohn’s disease in Jaipur, India in early December 2018. The exchange announced his death earlier this month. A death certificate was included in the list of exhibits. The founder seemingly had sole control or knowledge of Quadriga’s cold storage solution. Robertson wrote that after his death, “Quadriga’s inventory of cryptocurrency has become unavailable and some of it may be lost.”
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 QuadrigaCX, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (February 2019).
- Verify all logic paths related to Access Control 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
-
01
Source 1 https://www.quadrigacxtrustee.com/
- 02
Learn to Prevent the Next QuadrigaCX
The QuadrigaCX 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.