In a case of crypto crime evidently not shelling out, a hacker who stole some $600 million in digital assets from decentralized finance system Poly Network has started to return the ill-gotten gains.
Poly Network disclosed Tuesday it was the concentrate on of a single of the most significant ever cryptocurrency heists and instructed the hacker, “We want to establish interaction with you and urge you to return the hacked assets.”
As of about six:30 pm London time on Wednesday, the hacker had returned $260 million in assets, together with $256 million really worth of Binance Good Chain, $3.3 million of Ethereum, and $1 million of Polygon. A total of $269 million in Ethereum tokens and $84 million in Polygon tokens was nevertheless lacking.
“I think this demonstrates that even if you can steal crypto assets, laundering them and cashing out is very challenging, thanks to the transparency of the blockchain and the use of blockchain analytics,” stated Tom Robinson, main scientist of blockchain analytics organization Elliptic.
“In this case, the hacker concluded that the most secure solution was just to return the stolen assets,” he added.
The hack exploited a vulnerability in Poly Network, a DeFi system that facilitates peer-to-peer transactions with a concentrate on making it possible for people to transfer or swap tokens across unique blockchains.
“DeFi has develop into a vital concentrate on for attacks,” CNBC stated, noting that since the start off of the calendar year until eventually July, DeFi-connected hacks totaled $361 million — an boost of nearly three occasions from all of 2020, according to crypto compliance enterprise CipherTrace.
Soon following it was hacked, Poly urged cryptocurrency miners and exchanges to “blacklist” tokens coming from the hacker’s addresses. Security enterprise SlowMist stated its scientists had “grasped the attacker’s mailbox, IP, and device fingerprints” and were “tracking doable identification clues connected to the Poly Network attacker.”
“With the inherent transparency of blockchains and the eyes of an full sector on you, how could any cryptocurrency hacker be expecting to escape with a significant cache of stolen cash?” blockchain forensics organization Chainalysis stated.
In notes posted on a blockchain, the hacker stated he had made a decision to return the stolen assets due to the fact he was “not pretty intrigued in money.”