Millions stolen in a hacker attack on Poly Network

One of the largest cryptocurrency heists just took place as hackers have managed to steal the equivalent of $611 million in various cryptocurrencies from the Poly Network, a cross-chain decentralized finance platform (DeFi). Ploy Network reported the attack on Tuesday, stating that unidentified threat actors have managed to exploit a vulnerability in the platform’s system that has allowed them to loot thousands of cryptocurrency tokens of various cryptocurrencies. According to Poly Network, the flaw that the attackers have managed to exploit is a “vulnerability between contract calls”.

The stolen tokens have been transferred to three virtual wallets according to the report. The company has urged cryptominers that use its platform to blocklist any tokens coming from the addresses of those three wallets. Here are the wallets themselves:

• Ethereum: 0xC8a65Fadf0e0dDAf421F28FEAb69Bf6E2E589963 ($273 million)
• Binance Smart Chain: 0x0D6e286A7cfD25E0c01fEe9756765D8033B32C71 ($253 million)
• Polygon: 0x5dc3603C9D42Ff184153a8a9094a73d461663214 ($85 million)

Poly network has also posted an open letter addressing the hackers in an attempt to establish communication with them and to find a middle ground solution between that would ameliorate the situation.

In its open letter, Poly Network reminds the hackers that, since this is the biggest cryptocurrency theft in the history of DeFi, law enforcement in countries affected by the theft is likely to prosecute the criminal actors and bring them to justice.

Although tracking down cryptocurrency thieves and scammers is a difficult task, there already seems to be some progress towards identifying the attackers: the SlowMist blockchain security company claims to have been able to trace the email and IP addresses of the attacker(s) as well as their device’s fingerprint. According to SlowMist, the initial source of funds of the hackers was in Monero, which was later exchanged for other cryptocurrency such as ETH and MATIC.

Paolo Ardoino, the Chief Technology Officer of Tether company stated in a tweet that  the company has frozen $33 million in crypto tokens that were plundered during the Poly Network heist. In his 

The CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, tweeted that the company is doing its best, working with its partners towards mitigating the damage caused by the massive cryptocurrency theft.