WXETA Hack

Reported loss $110K
BNB Chain Ethereum
Access Control Exploit

What happened

Wrapped XETA (WXETA) lost about $110K on BNB Smart Chain on September 15, 2024. Its initialize function never set the flag that should stop it from being called again. An attacker called it again, gave itself minting rights, minted a huge amount of WXETA straight into the PancakeSwap stablecoin/WXETA pair, and swapped out almost the whole stablecoin reserve.

**Block data**

  • Attacker: 0x57ecf40b596274a985967e3f698437ae0a9600a0
  • Attack contract: 0x11bffb96daa9b0c47fef01401eb089549e87604e
  • Vulnerable contract: 0x05c2dd9cf547c6cccf91245346e6e1bc9926cae7
  • Exploit tx: 0x614da880bd46e98131accd9a83917abf3d56dac94caf13ae98eeff504eea3704

How it happened

  1. The attack contract called initialize on the WXETA diamond contract. Because the function did not mark the contract as initialized, it could be called again, and the attacker took control of minting.
  2. It called mint to create 10^15 WXETA directly in the PancakeSwap pair.
  3. It called swap on the pair to pull out nearly all of the pair's stablecoin reserve against the freshly minted WXETA.
  4. It sold the stablecoin for BNB through the PancakeSwap router, sent the proceeds to the attacker and self-destructed.

Protocol details

Classification Protocol Logic / Access Control
Protocol Type DeFi Protocol
Implementation language Solidity

Understand the attack patterns

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