Hacked last week, the Poly-Network project finally managed to recover the stolen funds. Now, the teams are preparing to relaunch the network and are discussing the distribution of a bug bounty to the attacker.
Hacker rewarded after his misdeeds
On August 11, the Poly-Network cross-chain protocol was the target of an unprecedented attack. In total, the attacker managed to drain the equivalent of $600 million in cryptocurrencies, making this hack the largest in the DeFi ecosystem.
A few days later, and after several exchanges between the protocol team and the attacker, the latter finally decided to return the funds. All the stolen funds were returned to the Binance Smart Chain, Polygon and Ethereum, except for the 33 million dollars frozen by Tether after the attack.
Following this return, Poly-Network offered a 500 000 dollars bonus to the attacker, in the form of a bug bounty. As a reminder, a bug bounty is a reward offered by a company to a hacker for having found a flaw in a computer system.
A surprising decision by the protocol
For his part, the attacker continued to communicate via transactions sent on the Ethereum blockchain. The latter explains that he accepted the $500,000 bounty, but plans to keep it to reward anyone else who is able to hack the Poly-Network platform a second time.
In the rest of his message, the attacker warns the Poly-Network teams. Indeed, if the latter failed to distribute the bounty, the attacker would be forced to “continue the show”. So many mysterious remarks that leave the case hanging, for the moment.
More recently, the DAO Maker protocol – which is not related to the MakerDAO protocol – was also the target of an attack resulting in the loss of $7 million. Unfortunately, in this case the attacker did not return the funds.
