Poly Network, the company that reported on Tuesday, August 10, that cryptocurrency worth more than $600 million had been stolen from it, appeared on Wednesday to have persuaded the hackers to return the money.
At the time of the writing of this, the decentralized finance platform or DeFi platform, had said on Twitter that the threat actor or actors had already returned cryptocurrency worth $4.77 million.
Read what they said here:
So far, we have received a total value of $4,772,297.675 assets returned by the hacker.
ETH address: $2,654,946.051
BSC address: $1,107,870.815
Polygon address: $1,009,480.809 pic.twitter.com/bPFAQk4mvS— Poly Network (@PolyNetwork2) August 11, 2021
With this, Poly Network looked set to emerge relatively unscathed from the largest theft of cryptocurrency — by dollar amount — to have taken place in the world.
Poly Network acknowledged the magnitude of the theft on Tuesday when it put out a statement on Twitter addressing the hacker. “The amount of money you hacked is the biggest one in the defi history,” it said.
The company added: “Law enforcement in any country will regard this as a major economic crime and you will be pursued. It is very unwise for you to do any further transactions.”
It then urged the threat actor: “You should talk to us to work out a solution.”
Read the full statement here:
— Poly Network (@PolyNetwork2) August 10, 2021
This seemed to have worked, because on Wednesday a UAE-based game developer who went by the name Syed Haider posted a series of screenshots of what appeared to be transactions in favor of Poly Network.
In the first of these tweets, Haider told Poly Network that the threat actor had “started transfering funds [sic]”.
The screenshots showed an entity named PolyNetwork Exploiter transferring funds back to Poly Network.
The company had on Tuesday already identified the vulnerability that had been exploited to break into its platform and steal the digital assets.
See one of the screenshots from Haider here:
bsc pic.twitter.com/UxKUmQcIDA
— Syed Haider (@haider1515) August 11, 2021
This comes after digital asset exchange Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao also acknowledged the attack and assured help for Poly Network on Tuesday.
