Cyber Attackers have reportedly snatched about $611 million in digital tokens from Poly Network’s platform . Poly Network is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform based in China. Tokens (or crypto tokens) represent an asset that resides on a blockchain. Unlike a crypto coin, a token is associated with a specific blockchain (or ledger). In this case, it was Poly Network’s platform that was used to steal Ethereum (ETH) and BowsCoin (BSC) tokens.
Based on recent publicly disclosed losses due to attacks, Poly Network’s losses are the largest to date to be associated with cyrptocurrency firms.
Reports claimed that it was one of the largest cryptocurrency hacks to date. , cyber attackers reportedly stole millions from the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, Poly Network.
In an “important notice” posted to Twitter, Poly Network stated: “We are sorry to announce that #PolyNetwork was attacked on @BinanceChain @ethereum and @0xPolygon Assets had been transferred to hacker’s following addresses: ETH: 0xC8a65Fadf0e0dDAf421F28FEAb69Bf6E2E589963 BSC: 0x0D6e286A7cfD25E0c01fEe9756765D8033B32C71.”
In a string of follow-up tweets the company urged crypto-miners “of affected blockchain and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens coming from the above addresses. @Tether_to @circlepay.”
Poly tweeted that it planned to take legal action and demanded that the attackers return the funds.
In a follow-up tweet posted at 7:47 a.m. ET, Poly Network said some assets ($4.7 million) were returned by the attackers.
“So far, we have received a total value of $4,772,297.675 assets returned by the hacker,” Poly Network tweeted.
In a message by hackers, associated with the illicit transaction, an attacker wrote; “I need a secured multisig wallet from you.” This, experts say, was an effort to return some of the stolen tokens.
A blockchain analysis by BleepingComputer revealed some of the loot stolen was also redirected to the non-profits Binance Charity and Archive.org. Additional funds were sent to blockchain search engine Etherscan and Ethereum blockchain developer infura.io.
Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, one of three platforms from which stolen assets were taken, wrote on Twitter: “We are aware of the poly.network exploit that occurred today. While no one controls BSC (or ETH), we are coordinating with all our security partners to proactively help. There are no guarantees. We will do as much as we can.”
In 2018, Coincheck, a Tokyo-based exchange, lost $530 million in digital coins. In 2013, Mt. Gox, another Tokyo-based exchange, collapsed after a massive distributed-denial-of-service attack triggered the loss of an estimated $500 million dollars in bitcoin. In 2019, Italian exchange BitGrail was hacked, with losses totalling an estimated $195 million.
*story rewritten (sourced from threatpost)