Biggest cryptocurrency heist in the last decade. Hackers stole over 600 millions dollar worth of crypto currency

Hackers exploited a vulnerability in Poly Network, a platform that looks to connect different blockchains so that they can work together.

Polygon Network announced Tuesday it was attacked on three blockchains: Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Polygon. After identifying the wallet addresses associated with the hackers, Poly Network called on miners, token developers, and crypto exchanges to blacklist any trades from them.

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A cryptocurrency platform says it experienced a massive security breach by hackers this week — resulting in more than $600 million in stolen assets, according to a blockchain security firm conducting analysis on the hack. Poly Network isn’t a crypto exchange or digital wallet platform. Instead, it helps facilitate crypto transfers between different cryptocurrencies’ blockchains. This can help people use their cryptocurrency across different networks.

Poly Network addressed the hacker in an open letter published Tuesday: “The amount of money you hacked is the biggest one in the defi [decentralized finance] history,” it read. “Law enforcement in any country will regard this as a major economic crime and you will be pursued.”

Hackers return nearly half of the $600 million they stole in one of the biggest crypto heists:-

So far, we have received a total value of $4,772,297.675 assets returned by the hacker.

ETH address: $2,654,946.051

BSC address: $1,107,870.815

Polygon address: $1,009,480.809

 

In a strange turn of events Wednesday, the hackers began returning some of the funds they stole.

As of 7 a.m. London time, more than $4.8 million had been returned to the Poly Network addresses. By 11 a.m. ET, about $258 million had been sent back.

“I think this demonstrates that even if you can steal cryptoassets, laundering them and cashing out is extremely difficult, due to the transparency of the blockchain and the use of blockchain analytics,” Tom Robinson, chief scientist of blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, said via email.

DeFi hacks on the rise:-

In recent times DeFi has become a key target for attacks. According to some reports since the start of the year until July, DeFi-related hacks totaled $361 million — an increase of nearly three times from all of 2020, according to cryptocurrency compliance company CipherTrace.

DeFi-related fraud is also on the rise. In the first seven months of the year, it accounted for 54% of total crypto fraud volume versus 3% for all of last year.

How you can protect your cryptocurrency:-

Story of digital asset theft has become a common one in now a days, and it may even be so common that it has discourages some investors from taking part in the digital currency space at all.

But still we have some ways to secure the currency through keeping them in cold wallets, as wallets are keys now a days for investers to keep the currency on the platforms. Digital exchange take there own precautions to prevent thefts, but they are not immune to hacks.

One of the best ways to protect your investment is to secure a wallet. There are two primary types of wallets, although new designs are coming into play all the time. Of these two types, hardware devices are perhaps the best option. These physical (or “cold”) wallets look like USB drives and act as a physical store for tokens or coins. Each hardware wallet is linked with a private key: a password-like bit of code that allows you to decrypt the wallet and access the coins or tokens that it stores. While hardware wallets are tremendously effective against digital thieves.