Incident Overview
UniverseToken was exploited via access control vulnerability. 1,447,175 $USD worth of assets were stolen and transferred through TornadoCash.
UniverseToken is a DEX on the Binance chain. The project's contract was exploited via access control vulnerability. The $UVT token price dropped by 99% after an incident.
The attacker was able to exploit the controller contract with unverified source code and withdraw roughly 100,000,000 $UVT tokens. Consequently, the tokens were swapped for 5011 $BNB and transferred to the EOA address. All the stolen amount was transferred through TornadoCash.
Attacker addresses:
https://bscscan.com/address/0xf3e3ae9a…f4f760
https://bscscan.com/address/0xbc1ac845…071ef6
Malicious contract:
https://bscscan.com/address/0x99d4311f…f87be9
Malicious transaction:
https://bscscan.com/address/0xbc1ac845…071ef6
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 Universe Token, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2022).
- 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 Universe Token
The Universe Token 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.