White hat hacker recovers $2M from faulty 2016 ICO smart contract
A white hat hacker known as “0xflorent” helped recover about 1,003 ETH, worth roughly $2 million, that had been stuck in a faulty Hong Coin (HONG) ICO smart contract for nearly a decade. The ICO launched in 2016 as a decentralized venture fund but failed to reach its funding goal, so investors were supposed to be automatically refunded. A bug in the refund logic prevented that, leaving the ETH locked. 0xflorent worked with the project’s creators to use a flawed admin function containing an integer overflow issue that reset token-holder balances and re-enabled refunds. The recovery covered 48 investors, and some refunds have already been processed on-chain. The effort also followed another recent rescue by 0xflorent of funds trapped in other failed or broken crypto projects.
