A decentralized finance (DeFi) company called Poly Network today announced that hackers were able to steal as much as $600 million worth of various cryptocurrencies managed on the Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, and Polygon blockchains.
This could be one of the largest cryptocurrency-related hacks to date, CoinDesk reported, if the entirety of that $600 million in assets managed on those chains was in fact compromised. Poly Network didn't share information about how much was stolen, but it did share the kinds of cryptocurrency stolen by the hackers.
That list includes:
- Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC)
- Wrapped Ethereum (WETH)
- RenBTC
- Dai
- Uniswap (UNI)
- Shiba Inu (SHIB)
- FEI
- USD Coin (USDC)
Poly Network shared a list of wallets associated with the theft and urged "miners of affected blockchain and crypto exchanges" as well as "token issuers" to "blacklist assets coming from" those addresses to prevent the stolen coins from being spent. At least some of those groups, such as Tether, have complied with that request.
Poly Network's announcement came shortly after Reuters reported that "losses from theft, hacks, and fraud" in the DeFi industry reached "a record $474 million from January to July," according to a study conducted by CipherTrace. This hack could have more than doubled those figures over the course of a single morning.
Much of the response to this hack has played out on Twitter. "HsakaTrades" reported that the hacker is tipping people who offer them useful information, and showed that many people are messaging the hacker to congratulate them on the heist. But some of those celebrations may have been premature.
The Block reported that a blockchain security firm called SlowMist claimed to have "tracked down the attacker's ID" as well as "their email address, IP information and device fingerprint." It might not be long before the hacker is forced to return what they stole and, presumably, face criminal charges for the $600 million theft.
