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Recently, a concerning pattern has been identified. Through anomaly data comparison, it is suspected to be a variant of "First Mint Attack."
First, observe the data phenomenon: investing 0.001 BNB to buy 1000 tokens (equivalent to $0.3), but upon withdrawal, actually receiving 15 million tokens (worth $450). The 1500x profit margin far exceeds any normal slippage or mathematical error range, indicating something suspicious is behind it.
The most likely attack method is directly calling the mint function. Some poorly designed token contracts do not implement permission checks during development, allowing anyone to directly invoke the mint function:
function mint(address to, uint amount) public {
_mint(to, amount);
}
In this case, an attacker only needs to buy a small amount of tokens (leaving an address record), then directly call mint to create tokens for themselves, and finally use these artificially created tokens to add or remove liquidity. The entire process appears no different from normal operations.
Another possibility is a transfer tax vulnerability. Some tokens impose a high transfer tax (e.g., 20%), so that when A transfers 100 tokens to B, B receives 80, and 20 are burned. But if the attacker becomes a liquidity provider, the pool transferring tokens to them might generate extra tokens due to bugs in the tax calculation.
Additionally, one must guard against balance synchronization attacks. After adding liquidity, an attacker might secretly increase their token balance elsewhere, then remove liquidity to extract more value.
All these methods involve manipulating the contract's logic itself. The key to prevention still depends on the quality of the token contract's audit and whether permission controls are properly implemented.