Hacker who stole 600 million from Poly Network, returned $260 million

The hacker who hacked the Poly Network DeFi platform and stole over $600 million returned $260 million from the stolen funds.

The distribution of stolen assets was as follows:

• Ethereum tokens: $273 million;
• Binance Smart Chain: $253 million;
• Polygon Network (in USDC): $85 million.

Poly Network representatives posted an open letter on Twitter asking the attacker to return the funds to avoid escalating the incident.

Oddly enough, this appeal worked, and now the Poly Network reports that the culprit has already returned $ 260 million in cryptocurrency: 256 million in Binance Smart Chain (BSC) tokens, 3.3 million in Ethereum tokens and 1 million in USD (USDC) Polygon Network.

In comments sent with transactions, the hacker answered some questions from the community. So, he writes that he hacked Poly Network just “for fun”, and began to return funds, because that was the plan from the very beginning. Allegedly, the attacker only wanted to expose the vulnerability in such an exotic way and teach a lesson to Poly Network.

When asked why the return is so slow, he replied that he needed time to communicate with the Poly Network team, as well as to defend his point of view without revealing his identity.

Information security experts believe that the hacker decided not to return the money out of altruism. The fact is that SlowMist specialists prepared a detailed analysis of this attack, and also reported that they managed to track the attacker’s ID and identify his email address, IP address and fingerprinting the device.

Interestingly, the hacker himself denies this, claiming that he used disposable mail and followed all the precautions.