White hat hacker recovers $2M from faulty 2016 ICO smart contract

A white-hat hacker has helped the creators of Hong Coin by showing them how to exploit a flawed admin function on a smart contract and ultimately refund investors after a decade.

A pseudonymous white hat hacker has helped recover $2 million worth of Ether locked in a faulty initial coin offering (ICO) smart contract for almost a decade.

In a post to X on Sunday, the white hat, known as “0xflorent,” said they helped recover about 1,003 Ether (ETH) from 48 investors who participated in the Hong Coin (HONG) ICO, a decentralized venture capital fund that never launched due to it failing to reach its funding goal.

“The contract held all the investors' ETH and was supposed to auto-refund them,” 0xflorent said. However, “a bug in the refund function quietly broke that, and the funds got stuck.” 

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