Poly Network

History

2021: Theft of $600 million as a result of a hacker attack

In early August 2021, the provider of the cross-chain decentralized financial platform Poly Network was exposed, as hacker attack a result of which more than $600 million was stolen. to cryptocurrency

Poly Network provides a service for which it provides interaction between several blockchains. The service allows users to exchange digital assets, such as cryptocurrency, between various blockchains supporting bitcoins, such as Ethereum, Neo, Onotology, Elrong, Zilqa and others.

On August 10, 2021, the company announced a hack on Twitter, saying that it was a theft of assets of Binance Chain, Ethereum, 0xPolygon. The exact amount of the stolen varies in different reports in different ways, but according to preliminary estimates, the total amount can reach $611 million.

Poly Network was hacked, as a result of which $600 million was stolen in cryptocurrency

According to The Block, the root cause of the hack was the problem with cryptography, which is allegedly not usually characteristic of such hacks. The safety team SlowMist, describes the incident in more detail from a technical point of view and notes the use of functions to transfer carefully designed data to change contracts on the Poly platform.

The scale of hacking and subsequent theft are the largest among companies specializing in DeFi on August 11, 2021. Various companies in the cryptocurrency and DeFi community have already offered their help.

Tether blacklisted the use of stolen Ethereum to buy USDT and urged others to blacklist tokens coming from a wallet that belongs to an attacker. The OKEx exchange also closely monitors the flow of coins obtained from hacking.

The identity of the hacker is unknown, but his actions can be tracked by public blockchains. Bleeding Computer reported that the hacker sent a small part to someone apparently, this person gave a tip or was involved at some stage. Then the attacker donated part of the funds to the charity foundations Binance Charity, Archive.org, Ethersane and infura.io.

Since cryptocurrency relies on blockchain and cryptography, all financial transactions are electronic and, as a result, are subject to cyber attacks, various computer vulnerabilities or attempts to circumvent security controls. Whether it is reverse development of cryptography or an attack on a resource or a source. Cybercriminals continue to find ways to circumvent controls in order to steal money for their financial gain and destroy customer portfolios, said security specialist James McQuiggan.

This clearly demonstrates that users should have autonomous wallets to protect a significant part of their investments, and not store them all in one place and risk losing all investments as a result of a data breach or attack, added James McQuiggan.^[1][2]

Notes