As a final ditch effort to retrieve all stolen assets, Poly Network offers the hacker the chief security advisor position in the platform along with a reward of US$500 thousand. While most of the US$600 million worth of digital assets were returned after the crypto heist on August 10, the hacker still holds US$33 million of the stolen cryptocurrencies.
The platform breach highlighted the risk of experimental software protocols by lesser-known crypto trading companies such as Poly Network. Since the site uses smart contracts to transfer tokens between Ethereum, Binance and Polygon blockchains, the hackers found a chink in the protocol’s armour.
According to a statement provided by Kelvin Fichter, one of Ethereum’s blockchain programmers, the hacker managed to override the smart contract instructions to redirect the funds to three different crypto wallet addresses.
Poly Network is adamant that the remaining balance is returned to their custody so that the team can push through its significant system upgrade to prevent this breach from happening in the future.
‘Although we did not receive a positive response from Mr White Hat, we still fulfilled our promise and credited 160 ETH (worth about $500,000) to the address Mr White Hat had made public,’ the Poly Network Team said in an official correspondence with Coindesk.
An anonymous person claiming to be the hacker behind the Poly Network attack said they will provide the key for the remaining stolen assets when everyone is ready, according to CNBC’s report.
Currently, the crypto network is gradually restarting suspended operations from the said attack. 31 of the supported assets including Binance coin (BNB) and Shiba (SHIB) were restored to full functionality.
In a report released by blockchain data platform Chainalysis, the hacker will find it extremely difficult to encash the tokens from the heist. The transparency of blockchain technology puts every detail in public which helps track down attacks like this.
In addition, the report said that in most cases, all the hackers can do is evade capture as the funds sit frozen in a private blacklisted wallet.
‘We believe that the sooner we assure him that Poly Network is recovering with security as the top priority, and in an organized manner, the sooner we can gain his trust and eventually obtain his private key,’ Poly Network said via Coindesk.
The unidentified hacker, dubbed as ‘Mr Whitehat’ by the Poly Network team, remains at large despite pulling off the largest crypto heist of the decade. It officially surpassed Coincheck’s US$500 million 2018 breach and the infamous Mt Gox incident in 2014 wherein US$460 million tokens were lost.
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