Incident Overview
Skyward Finance was exploited via smart contract vulnerability. Funds loss reached approximately 3,000,000 $USD
Skyward Finance is a decentralized exchange. The project's treasury was exploited on the NEAR chain. The attacker called redeem_skyward() function multiple times and transferred the funds to another address after an incident.
The funds loss is roughly 3,000,000 $USD.
Attacker address:
https://explorer.near.org/accounts/5ebc5ecca14a44175464d0e6a7d3b2a6890229cd5f19cfb29ce8b1651fd58d39
Malicious transaction:
https://explorer.near.org/transactions/92Gq7zehKPwSSnpoZ7LGGtSmgmBb4wP2XNDVJqUZRGqz
Incident Report
Protocol Information
Market Context at Time of Hack
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 Skyward Finance, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (November 2022).
- Verify all logic paths related to Reentrancy / Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Reentrancy attack class for patterns
- Check that all state-changing functions follow the Checks-Effects-Interactions (CEI) pattern to prevent reentrancy and logic ordering bugs
- 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 Skyward Finance
The Skyward Finance 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.