Incident Overview
On April 16, 2025, The R0AR staking contract was exploited due to a backdoor vulnerability, leading to the loss of approximately $790,000.
The attack stemmed from a maliciously embedded backdoor in the staking contract during its deployment. Specifically, the attacker preset the user.amount mapping for their wallet (0x8149f775…48401F) to a large value directly in the contract's storage. This manipulation gave the appearance that the wallet had staked a substantial number of tokens.
Later, by invoking the emergencyWithdraw() function, the attacker was able to withdraw 100 million $1ROR tokens from the contract. This withdrawal was possible despite the tokens never actually being staked, resulting in the full drain of the contract's funds. The vulnerability highlights poor storage initialization and the absence of proper validation checks on state variables at contract deployment.
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 The R0AR, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (April 2025).
- Verify all logic paths related to 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 The R0AR
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