The biggest hack in DeFi history

This week, hackers stole about $600 million worth of cryptocurrency from a Decentralized Finances (DeFi) network that specialized in enabling users to move digital assets linked to one blockchain to another.

PolyNetwork, a multi-chain interoperability technology, is at the heart of one of the largest hacking attacks in history.

PolyNetwork connects several of the world’s leading digital ledgers and blockchains, but it revealed on Tuesday that a hacker or hackers had discovered a weakness in its system, allowing them to access different digital ledgers and withdraw money from the network to their own online wallets.

PolyNetwork announced the digital raid through a series of tweets, asking crypto networks to blacklist the hackers and pleading with the hackers themselves to restore the assets.

Polynetwork took the unprecedented step yesterday of tweeting a message to hackers, claiming that the “amount of money you hacked is the largest in DeFi history.”

According to the business, its appeal to hackers to return the $610 million in recently stolen Bitcoin is beginning to bear fruit, with several million already returned. The theft impacts tens of thousands of individuals, PolyNetwork said in a letter addressed to the unknown hackers that was shared on Twitter.

The thieves took around $257 million in Ethereum, $252 million in Binance BNB, and $85 million in USDC tokens, according to security firm SlowMist, which detailed the assault in a Medium article.

On a global scale, this is being dubbed the biggest cryptocurrency breach of all time, particularly given the fact that dozens of other projects and businesses that use PolyNetwork were also impacted.

Once the hackers had access to the funds, they started sending them to a variety of different accounts.

The money was transferred to three wallet addresses: one on the Ethereum network, which included over $260 million, one on the BSC network, which had $250 million, and one on the Polygon network, which contained $85 million.

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, said that the company is “coordinating with all of the security partners to provide proactive assistance,” but noted that despite his awareness of the assault, “there are no promises” that the money would be returned.

Due to the hack, the O3 Swap cross-chain feature is temporarily disabled.

Hackers stole more than $600 million in different cryptocurrencies, committing what is possibly the biggest theft in the nascent realm of decentralized finance.

Sources: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5].