Incident Overview
The Thoreum Finance protocol was exploited due to the private key leaking. Estimated losses are about $580,000 USD.
The Thoreum Finance protocol was exploited, most likely it was an access control issue. Thus, the explorer had the ability to redeploy the proxy contract implementation with malicious logic inside. Approximately 500,000 THOREUM tokens were minted and swapped to WBNB.
After that funds were transferred through tornado cash mixer.
Attacker address:
https://bscscan.com/address/0x1ae2dc57…006f99
Attack tx:
https://bscscan.com/tx/0x5058c820…e18331
Tornado cash transfers:
https://bscscan.com/txs?a=0x1285fe34…d2e35c
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 Thoreum Finance, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (January 2023).
- 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
- 01
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04
Web Archive https://archive.ph/wip/O3VXj
Learn to Prevent the Next Thoreum Finance
The Thoreum 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.