Incident Overview
Webaverse, a Web3 metaverse game engine, lost $4 million in a cryptocurrency hack during a meeting with con artists posing as investors in a hotel lobby in Rome.
The cryptocurrency was taken from a recently created Trust Wallet during the meeting, and the hack happened despite the co-founder not being connected to a public WiFi network, and no one possibly seeing the private key. The money was split into six transactions and sent to six new addresses, none of which had any prior activity, before being almost entirely converted using 1inch's swap address feature into Ether (ETH), wrapped-Bitcoin (wBTC), and Tether (USDT).
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 Webaverse, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (November 2022).
- 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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Learn to Prevent the Next Webaverse
The Webaverse 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.