DeFi platform Poly Network was attacked on Tuesday, with the alleged hacker extracting approx $600 million in cryptocurrencies.
The company tweeted news that the network was attacked on BinanceChain, Ethereum, and 0xPolygon. Cryptocurrency wallet addresses disclosed by Poly manifest transfers of 2858 ether tokens worth about $267 million, 6610 binance coins worth over $252 million, and approx $85 million in USDT tokens on the Polygon network.
The $600 million figure marks the biggest hack ever in crypto history. Soon after the news of the hack, Tether froze around $33 million in USDT tokens associated with the alleged hacker’s wallet address, said its chief technology officer.
"We call on miners of affected blockchain and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens coming from the above addresses," tweeted, Poly Network.
Security firm SlowMist also rendered a statement a few hours after the attack, informing it had identified the attacker’s email, IP address, and device fingerprints, and was working on tracking additional identity clues.
SlowMist said that it acquired this information through its partner Chinese crypto exchange Hoo, plus other exchanges. Many crypto users have argued that the funds used for the attack originated on the Hoo exchange.
A China-based blockchain security firm, BlockSec, reported that the hack may be triggered by the leak of a private key that was used to sign the cross-chain message, and another possible cause is a potential bug during Poly’s signing process that may have been "abused" to sign the message.
To limit the wider implications of the hack O3, a trading pool that uses Poly Network to trade tokens among different blockchains suspended its cross-chain functionality temporarily.
Interestingly, the attacker sent a transaction from one of the wallets containing the stolen funds back to the same wallet, with a message that reads, "IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A BILLION HACK IF I HAD MOVED REMAINING SHITCOINS! DID I JUST SAVE THE PROJECT? NOT SO INTERESTED IN MONEY, NOW CONSIDERING RETURNING SOME TOKENS OR JUST LEAVING THEM HERE."
