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hardBlockchain Developer interview question

Your protocol is being exploited right now on mainnet. What do you do in the first hour and afterwards?

What the interviewer wants to hear

  • Confirm the attack and pause affected contracts using emergency roles
  • Have a prepared incident plan, war room and owners
  • Consider whitehat rescue of remaining funds, beware of front-running
  • Contact security partners, exchanges, bridges and stablecoin issuers to freeze
  • Communicate clearly, then do root cause analysis, fixes, audit and post-mortem

Model answer

First I confirm what is happening from monitoring and transactions, and open a war room with the people and keys we need, following our prepared incident plan. If the contracts have a pause or guard role, I use it at once to stop further losses, and I disable affected frontend actions. If funds remain at risk and cannot be paused, we consider a whitehat rescue, using a private transaction route so the attacker or bots cannot front-run us. In parallel we contact security groups such as SEAL 911, and exchanges, bridges and stablecoin issuers who may freeze stolen funds. We post a short, honest status update and keep it updated. Afterwards we trace the root cause, fix it with tests, get the fix reviewed or audited, and publish a full post-mortem with a recovery or compensation plan.

Can you answer it under time pressure?

Take a timed hard round and get scored on every answer.

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