Incident Overview
A vulnerability made it possible for an attacker to mint $Nearx 20 million.
Stader labs provides staking services and risk adjusted returns to delegators. The protocols smart contracts were exploited by an attacker named gregoshes.near. The attacker managed to transfer $NearX to his wallet without providing $NEAR as collateral. The attacker then utilized the illegitimately minted $NearX to drain $Near/$NearX pools on Jumbo Exchange and Ref Finance. In order to address the attack and identify the vulnerability the smart contract was paused. The Stader team has initialized communication with the attacker in order regain the stolen funds, which the attacker did not answer to.
The team has also established a recovery plan which will make all impacted liquidity providers whole again.
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 Stader.Near, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (August 2022).
- 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.
Free TrialSources & References
Learn to Prevent the Next Stader.Near
The Stader.Near 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.