The hackers were able to exploit a weakness in the contract system of Poly Network. The firm said that there was a vulnerability between contract calls. Poly Network, in a Twitter message, also asked the hacker to return the stolen assets.
Consequently, the conversation ultimately leads to a refund of 4.7 million dollars worth of assets—2.6 million dollars to Ethereum, 1.1 million dollars to Binance, and 1 million dollars to Polygon, as per the Poly Network tweet on Wednesday at 5.17 pm.
Furthermore, Theblockcrypto.com reports that hackers had stolen Ethereum tokens valued at $273 million, Smart Chain tokens valued at $253 million, and USDC coins valued at $85 million, all across the Polygon network.
In an odd occurrence on Wednesday, the hackers started returning part of the money that they took. The DeFi platform said that the money was further transferred to three crypto addresses.
More than $4.8 million, returned to the Poly Network by 7 am. London time. At 11 am. ET, about 258 million dollars, returned. Poly Network advised the exchange of cryptocurrencies to “blacklist tokens” from hacker-related addresses.
DeFi Hacks on the Rise
DeFi has become a significant attack target. The DeFi associated hacks amounted to 361 million dollars from the beginning of the year and July. Thus, an increase of more than three times over 2020 according to CipherTrace Crypto-Monetary Compliance.
DeFi refers primarily to a financial system in which financial goods are accessible on the decentralized blockchain network. Moreover available for use by anybody on a peer-to-peer basis, not to intermediaries, such as banks or a business, to conduct a transaction. Digital assets are one of the common applications of DeFi.
Despite the fanfare surrounding the Poly Network assault, some industry analysts have claimed it has shown the benefit of centralization in DeFi, at least to some extent.
Thus, the crypto community raises moral concerns regarding how significant players like Binance and Circle engage in cyber assaults on DeFi platforms.
Others are questioning if attackers such as those in the instance of Poly Network should be forgiven or even commended. Since they are progressively returning money to the protocols they have taken.