Socket Hack

TOTAL LOST $3.3M
Medium Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2024 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #529 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Derivatives Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

The Socket Protocol was exploited on January 16, 2024, which resulted in a loss of approximately $3.3 million worth of assets.

Details of the Exploit

Socket is an interoperability protocol that enables data and asset transfers across chains, with Bungee being a bridge aggregator built on SocketLL by the Socket team. On January 16, 2024, the Socket protocol experienced a security incident affecting wallets with infinite approvals granted to Socket contracts. The exploit's root cause was incomplete validation of user inputs, allowing the attacker to steal funds from users who had approved tokens for the vulnerable contracts. The attack impacted approximately 712 users, with the stolen funds remaining in the attacker's address.

Losses included 165,356 MATIC, 2.8896 WBTC, 42.4753 WETH, and 13,821 DAI, resulting in a total loss of around 3,300,000 USD.

Block Data Reference

Attacker Address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x50DF5a22…d39066

Malicious Transactions:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x591d054a…24ce54

https://etherscan.io/tx/0xc6c3331f…e28fd6

Malicious Contract Addresses:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xa5f1e956…1f1c8e

https://etherscan.io/address/0xf2d5951b…9c05d1

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Socket
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification Bridge
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Derivatives
Official Website socket.tech/
Protocol Twitter/X @SocketDotTech
Team Anonymous
Source Code Verified On-Chain

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
Toncoin Ecosystem
Protocol Links

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 other and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in Socket's contract logic - root cause: bridge
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 Other audit checklist and test coverage

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Socket, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (January 2024).

  • Verify all logic paths related to 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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Sources & References

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