White hat hackers help recover $2 million in ETH locked in a token sale smart contract from the 2016 era for nearly a decade

A white hat hacker using the alias "0xflorent" stated on X on Sunday that he has helped recover approximately 1,003 ETH (worth about $2 million) from a faulty smart contract of the Hong Coin (HONG) token sale in 2016, involving 48 investors.

Hong Coin was originally designed as a community-operated decentralized venture capital fund, with the token sale starting on August 29, 2016, and ending on October 28 of the same year, but it failed to launch due to not reaching its funding goal. The contract was supposed to automatically refund investors, but a vulnerability in the refund function caused the funds to be locked for nearly a decade.

0xflorent collaborated with the HONG creator to exploit an administrator function with an integer overflow vulnerability, resetting the token holders' balances and triggering the refund mechanism through specific inputs, successfully extracting the locked funds. According to Etherscan data, one investor has already received a refund of 96 ETH (approximately $192,500). Previously, on May 24, 0xflorent also recovered 19.33 ETH from another failed token sale project from 2018.