You may have recently heard the news story that a hacker stole $600 Million in Ethereum, BNB and Tokens pegged to the US dollar from the Poly Network platform. It was quite the scoop on Tuesday as that amount of assets is nothing to scoff at and major hacks are always game changers for the platforms that get hit. And in a legitimately shocking turn of events, the hacker decided to return a lot of what he managed to get out.
Presumably, it was because of crypto experts and businesses vowing to find the hacker and his activity, despite this, how it happened and his identity remain unknown, even if he returned it.
The hacker returned the assets through multiple transactions in which he returned all the ether ($267 Million), all the Binance coins ($252 Million) and some of the US pegged coins (~$55 Million). He seems to have left himself some tho, around $33 USDT that the issuer, Tether, said it froze to prevent it's further movement.
He embedded a few notes into his transactions claiming he was an ethical hacker and the vulnerability had to be exposed, whether or not that was really the way to do it is the question though, or if that was even the truth... Poly had also demanded he return the stolen funds to 3 specific addresses, wanting to return the assets to the tens of thousands of users that were taken advantage of.
It's also quite possible the hacker gave up on attempting to cash out the coins as there had been an international "blacklisting" of the address he had used and many responded to the request. With every hack on a different platforms, crypto experts and companies started to be more cautious with their security measures, so much so that is has now become both hard to hack and to extract and cash out whatever it is you have stolen. This is a big positive when it comes to how much trust we put into these platforms, though we should always have a bit of pessimism thrown in there.
There also seems to be a trend with hacked and ransomware attack extracted funds being returned. Either by the hackers themselves like with this or by someone helping out or managing to figure, something we don't know yet, out. This is both reassuring and somewhat fishy as we don't know how or why this is happening and if it could be used on our own accounts at one point if someone doesn't like what we're doing with our assets.
I've always been fascinated by hacking, and ethical hacking as well, but this does not seem to be that type of case. Taking $600 million to prove a point hardly seems like the ethical thing to do and definitely isn't going to look good if the guy ever ends up in court.
Thanks for reading!
