Impermax Finance

Private Key Leakage

Estimated loss

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VERDICT —OUT OF SCOPE

Root cause is private-key / signer compromise — the on-chain contract behaved exactly as written. No pre-deployment source audit or bytecode review reaches the key-custody perimeter; this is operational-security territory (HSM/MPC hygiene, key rotation, hot-wallet isolation). Bytecode would show nothing wrong.

▰ METHOD

PRIVATE KEY

PRIVATE-KEY

Root cause

Root-cause analysis not yet published. The incident description below contains all currently available signal — review the attack transaction directly for definitive forensics.

Forensic narrative

An official incident report from Impermax Finance stated that a hacker was able to steal approximately 9M IMX from several wallets controlled by the team. The IMX was not sold immediately after the hackers stole the funds. So the official team decided to get a head start by dumping a lot of tokens on the market before the hackers did anything. The Impermax lending protocol is completely immune to this, as the attack is caused by stolen private keys, not a bug in the smart contract. Attack method (per SlowMist): Private Key Leakage. Reported loss: 9,000,000 IMX.

Primary source

https://impermax.medium.com/imx-incident-post-mortem-and-recovery-plan-aeecd4e457ce ↗

Sourced from

slowmist

Technical record