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Summary
- At least US$611 million worth of tokens were stolen by hackers in a major breach of the cross-chain protocol Poly Network.
- The Poly Network operates on the Ethereum, Polygon, and Binance Smart Chain blockchains.
- The Poly team is looking at three addresses where the tokens may have been transferred.
Cyber hackers siphoned off at least US$611 million from cross-chain protocol Poly Network in the largest DeFi breach to date, the company said on Tuesday. The team behind the network has urged miners and crypto exchanges to blacklist the tokens that were taken away.
The Poly Network is a protocol that allows users to swap tokens across blockchain platforms like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ontology and created by individuals who have worked on blockchain platforms like Neo and Switcheo. Detailing the cyberattack, the Poly Network team expressed regret for the breach on BinanceChain Ethereum and 0xPolygon Tuesday.
The stolen assets included tokens worth US$273 million from Ethereum, US$253 million tokens from Binance Smart Chain, and US$85 million coins from USDC on the Polygon network.
After the attack, Tether blocked the stolen USDT tokens, an integrated stablecoin that the owning company can freeze like other stablecoins. The tokens were worth roughly US$33 million. So with this move, hackers will no longer be able to shift them.
Reacting to the hack, Binance crypto exchange CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted that his team proactively coordinated with security partners for help. Although there is no guarantee of recovering all the losses, he said that his team would do its best to handle the situation.
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Igor Igamberdiev of The Block Research said that the cause of the hack was a cryptography issue, which is not typically the case in most cyberattacks. The latest hack resembled the attack on Anyswap when hackers stole US$7.9 million worth of coins by reversing the private key.
Because of the attack, O3 that uses Poly Network, also called the cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, to trade tokens had to suspend its cross-chain functionality.
The Poly team said that hackers struck each chain consecutively. Meanwhile, it is looking at three addresses where the stolen tokens may have been transferred.
Source: Pixabay
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DeFi crimes rise in 2021
In recent months, the cross-chain decentralized finance platform or DeFi, a robust segment in the crypto sector, has witnessed several attacks, from theft, hacks, to fraud.
According to the crypto intelligence company CipherTrace, such attacks increased in the first seven months of this year, registering losses of a record US$474 million.
However, overall losses in the crypto market from crimes fell sharply to US$681 million in the first seven months from US$1.9 billion for the whole of 2020. The figures show that improved security infrastructure and the industry's growing maturity are helping prevent major crimes today.
