White hat helps to get 2 million dollars from the 2016 ICO project
An anonymous white hat hacker managed to steal $2 million worth of Ether locked up in a botched Initial Coin Offering (ICO) smart contract for almost a decade.
In a post on X on Sunday, the white hat known as “0xflorent” helped recover 1,003 Ether (ETH) from the 48 investors who participated in the Hong Coin (HONG) ICO decentralized venture capital fund after failing to reach its funding goal.
0xFlorent said, “The contract held all the investors ETH and the money was supposed to be returned automatically.” However, he “quietly broke the refund function, and the funds are stuck.”
According to data from Ethereum block explorer EtherScan, one Hong investor has already been refunded 96 ETH, which is now worth $192,500, and another 0.5 ETH has been refunded.
Source: 0xflorent.eth
The Hong Kong coin was first minted in 1988. That was in 2016, and at the time a YouTube video showed the token as a community-driven venture capital fund where members of the project's decentralized, autonomous organization help decide which projects get funding.
The ICO started on August 29, 2016 and ended almost two months later on October 28.
Investors who sent ETH to the HONG smart contract were supposed to receive 250 million HONG tokens divided into five phases, but funding did not reach the goal and investors had to get their money back.
Oxflorent has partnered with the creators of HONG to reset token holders' balances and trigger a refund mechanism using the locked admin function, showing how to withdraw the locked funds.
Related: Ethereum Bull David Hoffman Explains Why He Sold His ETH
“The way out was a manager function with an integer overflow vulnerability,” he explained. “Calling with a specific input resets the hold balance and stops the refund check.”
On May 24th, 0xflorent claimed to have found a Liquality Wallet user who had a combined 19.33 ETH worth $40,600 from a failed January 2018 ICO project and some cash held in the chain transfer protocol.
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