It’s not the sort of thing you typically see.
August 10th saw hackers steal around $610 million in cryptocurrency from PolyNetwork, a service that enables transactions between blockchains. And oddly enough, after the news of the hacker’s bogus transactions were released to the public, the hackers have returned over half of the money already, with more likely to come.
PolyNetwork is a DeFi (decentralized finance) platform; in essence, they skip the middlemen and enable peer-to-peer transactions between the major public blockchains. Think transactions between Bitcoin and Etherium and you’re on the right track.
Anyway, the hackers found a way to control these transactions, siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars worth of various cryptocurrencies into three digital wallets. After which, PolyNetwork took to Twitter to ask for the return of the stolen goods.
And also later posted the addresses of the wallets used to house this stolen cryptocurrency, rendering it basically unspendable.
Nobody is going to deal with any of these wallets, knowing that they’re blacklisted. And so really, the hacker’s only recourse was to play ball with them. Which he did. PolyNetwork went on to post that they were working with the hacker, gong by the name “Mr. White Hat” to return the money.
And per PolyNetwork, $342 million of the stolen cryptocurrency has been returned already, with more to come. Specifically, $268 million all in Etherium remains outstanding.
Though, admittedly, it’s pretty funny that the guy who essentially tried to pull a Superman III: Cryptocurrency Edition had the gall to call himself Mr. White Hat.
Source: PC Gamer
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