Incident Overview
A DNS attack was made on Ribbon Finance. During the attack one of the users lost 16.5 $WBTC.
A DNS attack was carried out on the Ribbon Finance project, during which 16.5 $WBTC was lost. The on-chain analysis revealed that the attack has common features with the DNS attack on Convex Finance and was made by the same hacker team. Hackers created a similar website with a malicious contract that required calling the approve() function.
Scammer address: https://etherscan.io/address/0xb7326148…5af9aa
Contract creator address: https://etherscan.io/address/0x47832f55…146fc6
Malicious contract address: https://etherscan.io/address/0x65a8ec2c…453b2f
Transferring 16.5 $WBTC from "victim" to scammer address transaction: https://etherscan.io/tx/0xd09057f1…510850
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 Ribbon Finance, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (June 2022).
- 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.
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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Learn to Prevent the Next Ribbon Finance
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