Rubic Hack

TOTAL LOST $1.4M
Medium Router Exploit / Other ethereum

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain ethereum Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #728 By amount stolen
Auditors 2 Prior security audits

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

USDC balances of Rubic’s users have been drained. The current losses reached $1.42M.

Details of the Exploit

All USDC approved to the RubicProxy contract got under the risk of being drained after the USDC address was added into the list of available routers in the RubicProxy contract.

Through the routerCallNative()  function, the attacker could call safeTransferFrom() on the USDC contract inputting user addresses, which have approved their USDC balances to be spent by RubicProxy, as the “from” parameter.

Block Data Reference

The attacker address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x001b91c7…0b6ee9

The exploit transactions:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x9a97d856…8e7d46

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x6551b933…e36e56

The “add available router ” transaction:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x30679e7b…1bbe66

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Rubic
Date of Incident
Affected Chain(s) ethereum
Attack Technique Router Exploit / Other
Classification Protocol Logic / Exchange (DEX)
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type DEX Aggregator
Affected Token RBC
Smart Contract Language Solidity
Official Website rubic.exchange/
Protocol Twitter/X @CryptoRubic
Team Anonymous
Source Code Verified On-Chain

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
DeFi Ethereum Ecosystem Arbitrum Ecosystem BNB Chain Ecosystem
Protocol Links
GitHub Discord Reddit Telegram

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 router exploit / other and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with ethereum smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in Rubic's contract logic - root cause: protocol logic / exchange (dex)
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 Router Exploit / Other audit checklist and test coverage
Audited by Audit Report 1, Audit Report 2 — still lost $1.4M. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Rubic, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (December 2022).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Router Exploit / Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation
  • 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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Security Audit History

Proof-of-Concept Exploits

1 PoC available
poc-exploits - rubic
$ Rubic Arbitrary External Call Vulnerability

On-Chain Evidence & References

Sources & References

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