Incident Overview
Access control issue leads to $4M Loss at ShidoGlobal
ShidoGlobal recently encountered a transfer of ownership, resulting in a significant loss amounting to approximately $4 million. The exploit occurred when the new owner swiftly upgraded the StakingV4Proxy contract by introducing a concealed withdrawToken() function. This function enabled the attacker to execute withdrawals of the entire balance of 4,353,473,223.864904 $SHIDO tokens from the contract.
Subsequently, the attacker swapped a portion of the acquired $SHIDO tokens for $ETH and transferred 692.8 $ETH, equivalent to $2.4 million, to address 0x4621e0cd…25c5dd. The remaining $SHIDO tokens, valued at $1.6 million, are still retained in the attacker's address 0x1982358c…d0041f.
Ownership Transfer Transaction:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0xaa76ea50…aafcbe
Attacker's ETH Address:
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 Shido, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (February 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Private Key Compromised / 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
Learn to Prevent the Next Shido
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