Crypto Global

Poly Network Hack: Hackers return almost half of the $ 600 million

Aug 17, 2021

Last week, hackers stole $600 million worth of cryptocurrency in an attack. It should be the biggest theft in the history of cryptocurrencies.

Poly Network announced that strangers had cracked Poly Network's security measures. The company wrote to the hackers asking them to return the crypto money. The company also called on the crypto exchanges in a public appeal to blacklist all tokens from the identified wallet addresses. Hacker attacks are not uncommon in the crypto world. According to the company, however, this is the biggest theft in the history of cryptocurrencies. In this case, these hackers exploited a vulnerability in the Poly Network system and were able to steal users' deposits. For those who don't know: The Poly Network project started in 2020 and is a collaboration between Ontology, Neo and Switcheo. The aim is to build a cross-chain ecosystem that enables transactions between different blockchains. The attacks stole assets from the Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum and the Polygon Network. The blockchain data from the respective networks shows that the hackers stole around $273 million from Ethereum, $85 million from the Polygon network and $253 million from the Binance Smart Chain. They were able to identify three wallet addresses to which the stolen cryptocurrencies were transferred.

After the blacklisting, the hacker started returning the stolen crypto assets. Presumably, the blockchain security company Slowmist played a key role in ensuring that the perpetrators return the stolen crypto assets so quickly.

According to the last tweet from Poly Network, the hackers have tokens worth USD 3.3 million on Ethereum, the total stolen tokens from the Binance Smart Chain worth USD 253 million and USD coins worth USD 1 million returned from the Polygon blockchain. The return came a day later after the blockchain security company Slowmist apparently received the hacker's identification data.

On August 12th, the hacker wrote “ready to repay the funds!” in an Ethereum transaction sent to himself from the Poly Network Explorer address. The self-proclaimed hacker also claims to have carried out the theft "for fun" and it was "always the plan" to finally return the money.

For the crypto market, this attack means that even if you steal crypto assets, the payout is extremely difficult due to the transparency of the blockchain and the use of blockchain analytics.

And what does this attack on the underlying blockchain technology mean? So does this mean that the supposedly non-hackable blockchain has been hacked?

The answer to this question is no. No blockchain was hacked. It was an application running on a number of different blockchains that was hacked. The application was vulnerable and not the underlying blockchain. So far, blockchain has proven to be incredibly resilient and secure. Some applications that developers code and deploy on blockchains are not properly tested and verified and therefore have security flaws.