What a crypto show, although unintended. I am talking about last week’s biggest DEFI crypto thrift event in history, yes, the 600$ million hack of the Poly Network incident.
The show started with the hack and then continued with unexpected turns of events making episodes that are super interesting, extraordinary and in many ways hilarious.
This particular hacker was not the greedy type so this crypto smart hacker, nicknamed as Mr White Hat by the Poly Network team, returned almost all of the funds that were stolen last week except for 33$ million USDT that was frozen.
It’s possible that this last remnant of the stolen funds are returned by now, check the latest updates.
This Poly Network’s historic hack episode had unique and fascinating aspects, with the hacker communicating in a cool way through Ethereum Blockchain by embedding messages in Ethereum Transactions he/she sent to himself/herself !!
White Hat communicated through messages embedding input data on ETH transactions
Both, Poly Network team and Mr White Hat established successful communication this way, resulting in arrangements for the hacker to return the stolen funds. Now, a little background on this historic DEFI hack.
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
Last Tuesday, our famous anonymous White Hat character, hacked Poly Network , a Blockchain platform enabling inteteroble transactions between Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Polygon. The hack amount was enormous - 600$ million with various cryptos stolen from these three chains - Ethereum ($264 million), Binance Smart Chain ($250 million) and Polygon ($85 million).
After the hack, the Poly Network team announced about the hack on twitter and told Crypto Exchanges and miners to blacklist 3 addresses to where the stolen funds were sent.
Then things get a little action packed with the hacker managing to deposit some USDC and Dai coins into Curve’s pool, while Tether’s CTO Paolo Ardoino blacklisted the mentioned hacker’s USDT address so the USDT funds in the hackers wallet got frozen.
Poly Network team meanwhile put forth a letter addressed to the hacker on twitter, telling the hacker to return the stolen funds, informing the hacker that the hack conducted was “the biggest hack in DeFi history” , so it will be regarded as a “major economic crime” in any country of the world, and the hacker would “be pursued”.
Poly Network team asked the hacker to establish communication with them so that a solution can be worked out that would be beneficial to both the parties.
This interesting hacker character, “Mr White Hat” then established communication with the Poly Network through a message embedded in an Ethereum transaction that was sent to himself/herself which said - “Ready to return the fund!”
Then the hacker communicated through another Ethereum transaction message - “Failed to contact the Poly. I need a secured multisig wallet from you”
In response to this, the Poly Network team created 3 multi-signature wallet addresses controlled by the team and conveyed to the hacker in his/her style ( via an embedded Ethereum Transaction message) that the funds can be sent back to the given multi-signature wallet addresses.
Post this, positive developments took place with the hacker sending back some portions of the stolen crypto funds periodically.
This White Hat hacker, as I understand, remains untraced, because he/she used a temporary email id and IP address so security firm Slow Mist could not trace this hacker’s identity through any digital fingerprints.
White Hat held an AMA style(Ask me anything) conversation about this hack through Ethereum Transaction messages too, making things very interesting and entertaining.
White Hat revealed that the point of the hack was only to have fun while teaching Poly Network a lesson. Once the protocol’s vulnerability was discovered, this character felt it better to do a hack and demonstrate the vulnerability to the Poly Network team before any one else discovers it and steals the funds.
You can check out that AMA style conversion here where the White Hat said the plan was always to return back the stolen funds. Some funds were moved to Curve to earn interest to cover incurred expenses while the hacker character was communicating with the Poly Network team about returning back the stolen funds.
The considerate hacker also rewarded 13.37 ETH ($42,300) to hanashiro.eth for tipping White Hat about with the message in twitter - “DONT USE YOUR USDT TOKEN YOU VE GOT BLACKLISTED.”
The Poly Network team has appreciated White Hat for exposing the vulnerability in the protocol and offered a $500,000 bounty for the white hat behavior shown but White Hat refused the bounty.
In a world that’s dominated by unscrupulous hackers, stealing crypto funds ruthlessly in various ingenious ways, this episode is a heartening one indeed.
And whoever this White Hat character is, his/her hack has made DEFI history. What matters in the end is that, the episode had a happy ending with investors getting back their stolen funds(:
Image by Thomas Vanhaecht from Pixabay
It’s Interesting that anonymous characters in the crypto world have created history, because who created bitcoin?, the anonymous Nakamoto Satoshi and now an anonymous White Hat character creates history by conducting the biggest hack in crypto history just to expose the vulnerability in the Poly Network Protocol and returning back the stolen funds(: .
Awww… Love this kind of happy ending and that’s why I keep saying I am so lucky to be in crypto space, life is never boring!!
