Incident Overview
TheStandard.io exploited through price manipulation on Arbitrum, resulting in a temporary loss of 264,000 USD worth of USDC.e and EURO.
TheStandard.io, a project running on multiple chains including Arbitrum, fell victim to a sophisticated price manipulation attack on November 7, 2023. The attacker leveraged the low liquidity of Paxos on Uniswap on the Arbitrum network, manipulating the price of Paxos Global gold to cents. By controlling the majority of liquidity in the PAX Gold (PAXG) pool, the attacker deposited 10 Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) as collateral in a smart vault and borrowed the maximum amount of EUROs without getting liquidated.
The manipulated low price of PAXG caused the vault to register as undercollateralized, allowing the attacker to access the borrowed EUROs. They used these funds to drain liquidity from the EURO/USDC.e pool on CamelotDEX, further profiting from the attack. Most of the drained funds were made up of protocol-controlled values.
However, the attacker returned the stolen funds on November 9, 2023.
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 TheStandard.io, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (November 2023).
- 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 TrialFunds Recovery
Recovered
$264K
Net Loss
0
Security Audit History
- Audit Report 1 Report
Sources & References
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