Wallet Drain Hack

TOTAL LOST $2.4M
Medium Phishing

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2023 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #601 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exploit/Phishing Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Phishing attack on Ethereum user results in loss of $2,430,419 worth of FTM, USDC, and USDT, later converted to 1,082.98 ETH.

Details of the Exploit

On December 21, 2023, a user on the Ethereum chain fell victim to a phishing attack. The attacker managed to gain access to the victim's wallet and drained their FTM, USDC, and USDT holdings. The stolen funds were subsequently swapped to ETH using MetaMask and then transferred to another EOA. In an attempt to recover their funds, the victim sent an on-chain message offering a negotiable bounty for assistance.

The total loss from this phishing attack is estimated to be around $2,430,419, equivalent to 1,082.98 ETH.

Block Data Reference

Attacker Address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x4ce2f0bb…c760f1

Funds Holder as of Dec 26, 2023:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xb919a54f…29727d

Malicious Transaction:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0xe98ec2be…dee98f

On-chain Message:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0xd152042a…ce4b3e

This is classified as a Phishing Attacks . Compare similar hacks →

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Wallet Drain
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Phishing
Classification Other
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exploit/Phishing
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 phishing 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 Wallet Drain's contract logic - root cause: other
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 Phishing audit checklist and test coverage

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Wallet Drain, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (December 2023).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Phishing are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Phishing 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.

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Related Attack Classes

The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:

See all Phishing Attacks examples →

Phishing Attacks

Sources & References

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