Incident Overview
The transaction behind the attack:
https://bscscan.com/tx/0x7e2a6ec0…8531d2
The hacker made a flash loan of 10,000 BNB and purchased 202 trillion SURGEs, next sell() 202 trillion SURGEs within reentrancy to purchase(), where the price is calculated before updating _totalSupply to a smaller one, thus gaining more SURGEs.
The hacker exploited five times in five different transactions and gained 13,112 BNBs in total (with ~$5.57M). The funds were transferred to Ethereum via Binance Bridge.
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 XSURGE, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (August 2021).
- Verify all logic paths related to Flash Loan Attack are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Flash Loans 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
Learn to Prevent the Next XSURGE
The XSURGE 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.