Levyathan

Private Key Leakage

Estimated loss

$1.50M

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.

▰ PROOF OF CONCEPT

DEFIHACKLABS

src/test/2021-07/Levyathan_exp.sol

view forked test on github ↗

Reproducible Foundry test fork from SunWeb3Sec/DeFiHackLabs. Clone the repo, run forge test against the file path above, and replay the exploit against a mainnet fork at the historical block. Use for reproduction only — not for live targets.

Forensic narrative

Levyathan, the encryption index protocol on the BSC chain, was attacked. According to the official event update, the hacker minted 100,000,000,000,000,000,0 billion LEV tokens, which caused the price of LEV to return to zero. The loss of this attack was approximately USD 1.5 million. The official attributed the accident to the leak of the developer's private key. Attack method (per SlowMist): Private Key Leakage. Reported loss: $ 1,500,000.

Primary source

https://www.bsc.news/post/levyathan-falls-casualty-to-unlimited-mint-exploit-despite-certik-audit ↗

Sourced from

slowmist

Technical record