Venus Token Hack

TOTAL LOST $17K
Low Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2023 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #1902 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Ponzi Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Venus Token vault was exploited, resulting in a loss of 16,937 $USD.

Details of the Exploit

Venus Token is a BEP20 token trading on PancakeSwap. The vault contract VenusDevide was exploited. Worth mentioning that the affected contract has no relationship with the original token, and the token has over 600,000 $USD in liquidity after the exploit.

An EOA address could call an unprotected function on an unverified contract named VenusDevide which held more than 8 million $VUS tokens. The attacker deployed multiple malicious contracts and withdrew $VUS tokens from the vulnerable contract. They then swapped them for 54.7 $BNB (worth 16,937 $USD at the time) before self-destructing their malicious contracts.

All stolen funds remain in possession of the attacker's original address.

Block Data Reference

Attacker Address:

https://bscscan.com/address/0x4C1F9028…322E5A

Malicious Transaction:

https://bscscan.com/tx/0x90ee7abd…3c249f

Swap Transaction:

https://bscscan.com/tx/0x457a20d1…606eb1

Main Malicious Contract:

https://bscscan.com/address/0x78C6FA5F…232759

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Venus Token
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification Token

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Ponzi
Affected Token VUS
Official Website viescoin.xyz/home
Protocol Twitter/X @ViesCoin
Team Anonymous
Source Code Unverified

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 other and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in Venus Token's contract logic - root cause: token
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 Other audit checklist and test coverage

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Venus Token, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (May 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.

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