Turtle Dex Hack

TOTAL LOST $2.5M
Medium Drained Contracts bsc

Summarize with AI

Affected Chain bsc Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #592 By amount stolen
Year 2021 Incident year

Incident Overview

Turtle Pepe (TUPE) is a cryptocurrency launched in 2024and operates on the Solana platform. Turtle Pepe has a current supply of 397,926,310 with 0 in circulation. The last known price of Turtle Pepe is 0.0000077 USD and is up 6.66 over the last 24 hours.

It is currently trading on 1 active market(s) with $0.00 traded over the last 24 hours. More information can be found at https://turtlepepe.com/.

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Turtle Dex
Date of Incident
Affected Chain(s) bsc
Attack Technique Drained Contracts
Classification Rugpull
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Smart Contract Language Solidity
Official Website turtlepepe.com/
Protocol Twitter/X @TurtlepepeSOL

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
Memes Solana Ecosystem

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

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Turtle Dex, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (March 2021).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Drained Contracts 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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