08/24/2021 17:41
Clarín.com
Technology
Updated 08/24/2021 5:41 PM
The author of the record hit to the world of cryptocurrencies
decided to return all the assets he had stolen - the equivalent of about $ 610 million -
to the Poly Network platform.
In a spontaneous act, the cybercriminal surprised by restoring even the last crypto that he had "borrowed" from the specialized transfer platform.
"At this point, all user assets that were transferred during the incident have been fully recovered
," the Poly Network company explained in an official announcement on
Medium
.
The hacker (or group of hackers) decided to return all the money, renouncing to keep absolutely nothing of the proceeds.
In a desperate attempt, on August 10, hours of the incident, Poly Network had written a request on Twitter claiming the loot from hackers arguing that
"the money you have stolen is from tens of thousands of members of the crypto community
.
"
Either because the message struck a chord with the criminal or because Poly Network called "miners of the affected
blockchains and cryptocurrency
negotiators to veto the tokens" from those addresses,
the attacker began to return part of the bitcoin, ethereum and more tokens.
Poly Network, victim of the biggest crypto theft in history.
Within a few hours, half of what was stolen had been returned.
Little by little everything was returned and now that the $ 610 million is back in the hands of Poly Network, they
will proceed to return it to customers
.
The anonymous hacker behind the attack, which the company dubbed
Mr. White Hat
(
Mr Hat White
, referring to the so -
called "hacker ethics" or "good hackers")
said he had done it
for "fun" and to see if the company "learned something
.
"
The company offered the white man
a reward of $ 50,000 if he did not publicize the vulnerability
.
The hacker however insisted that it was better to donate that money to the technical community, which has made more contributions to the security of blockchain technology.
Within hours, the criminal had returned part of the loot and then delivered the rest.
Photo REUTERS
In recognition,
Poly Network decided to hire "white hat" as a security advisor
, in addition to establishing a rewards program for consultants and programmers to discover more security flaws on its platform.
As if to make a clean slate, they reported that
the vulnerabilities
that allowed the theft of cryptocurrencies
have already been patched
.
High risks
Scams in this sector are becoming more and more frequent
.
At the end of April, crypto thefts, hacks and fraud totaled about $ 432 million, according to an analysis by
CipherTrace
.
One major case features Turkish cryptocurrency exchange Thodex, which abruptly stopped its operations in April.
Although the service indicated that "there was no need to worry", there were 391,000 users and between 2 and 10 billion dollars under the magnifying glass.
In addition, the CEO of the company
left the country and ended up with an international arrest warrant.
A few days later, the Turkish police arrested 62 people in the framework of the investigation into a possible scam that exchange.
Thodex, founded under this name in 2019, was one of the most important cryptocurrency exchanges in Turkey, with a transaction volume of around 700 million dollars a day in currencies such as Bitcoin, Dogecoin or Holo, before its final closure.
SL
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