Incident Overview
WazirXIndia Exchange Multisig got compromised and lost $230M worth of assets on $ETH
On July 19, 2024, the WazirX Multisig was exploited, resulting in the theft of $230M. The attacker managed to drain the funds by first compromising the signers' Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) and subsequently changing the implementation of the Multisig. The attack began with a specific transaction (Etherscan link), where the attacker executed a delegate call from the compromised multisig to a proprietary contract deployed eight days earlier.
The delegate call data was 0x804e1f0a000000000000000000000000ef279c2ab14960aa319008cbea384b9f8ac35fc6, which modified the slot 0 of the multisig proxy to point to the new proprietary contract. Tools like evm.storage confirmed that before the attack, slot 0 contained the standard safe implementation, and afterward, it pointed to the attacker's contract. Further analysis showed that after the implementation modification, all transactions to the Safe Multisig redirected delegate calls to the new address, which simply transferred assets to the attacker.
Attacker
https://etherscan.io/address/0xd9671132…34f372
Attack tx:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x48164d3a…3e185d
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 WazirX: India, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (July 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Safe Multisig wallet Phishing 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 TrialRelated Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
- 01
- 02
- 03
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