Incident Overview
On March 30, 2023, the RPL balance of the poap.eth wallet (0xf6B6F078…A9C863) was drained due to a phishing attack.
The attacker used a phishing attack against the owner of the poap.eth wallet and gained a significant allowance in RPL tokens. Two different exploiter addresses then executed the transferFrom() function, resulting in the theft of 21,474 and 64,423 tokens. The RPL tokens were subsequently swapped to ETH and dispersed between a few different wallets.
Approve tx:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0xd36e7d75…373add
transferFrom tx:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x13cd0edd…d0f632
https://etherscan.io/tx/0xc3a9d6e4…69819b
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 Rocket Pool, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (March 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.
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 Rocket Pool
The Rocket Pool 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.