Incident Overview
The Yield Robot contract on the Binance Smart Chain was rug pulled with a profit worth $2.1M USD.
The Yield Robot contract on the Binance Smart Chain was drained of $2.1 million on January 17th, 2023. The project team initially announced it was exploited, but further investigation shows evidence of an exit scam. The incident was possible due to a change in the signer wallet, which allowed the attacker to redeem a coupon that would otherwise have been rejected.
The attacker used the coupon system to claim a coupon worth $2.1 million and then transferred the reward balance to their wallet. The Yield Robot deployer later used the wallet to create an unverified contract, which was likely a copy of the original contract, but with the deposit address changed to the attacker's wallet. New deposits were made, but later reverted back to the original deposit wallet.
Set signer TX:
https://bscscan.com/tx/0x31bf8f7f…156cab
Rug TX:
https://bscscan.com/tx/0xb66c4003…0995ed
Scammer address:
https://bscscan.com/address/0x8f2dba87…654a4a
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 YieldRobot, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (January 2023).
- Verify all logic paths related to Rugpull 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
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