Incident Overview
On September 22, 2025, UXLINK, a decentralized social project, suffered a multi-signature wallet exploit resulting in over $21.7 million in stolen assets. The attacker gained unauthorized minting rights and issued an additional 1 billion UXLINK tokens, causing the token price to plummet 70%. In an unusual twist, the original hacker later lost approximately $48 million worth of UXLINK tokens to a secondary phishing attack.
The attack began with a security breach of UXLINK's multi-signature wallet system where the attacker used delegateCall to remove administrator privileges, called addOwnerWithThreshold to gain control, and transferred approximately $11.3 million in various assets including $4 million USDT, $500,000 USDC, 3.7 WBTC, and 25 ETH. The attacker then gained minting rights and issued 1 billion additional UXLINK tokens on Arbitrum, severely diluting the token supply. UXLINK responded by coordinating with major exchanges to freeze suspicious deposits and initiated a token swap plan while developing compensation measures for affected users.
In a rare "hacker-on-hacker" crime, the original attacker subsequently fell victim to an Inferno Drainer phishing attack, losing approximately 542 million UXLINK tokens (worth about $48 million) to secondary criminals.
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 UXLINK, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (September 2025).
- Verify all logic paths related to Delegatecall Exploit / 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 TrialSecurity Audit History
- Audit Report 1 Report
Related Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
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