A few weeks ago Poly Network suffered one of the biggest hacks in history. The blockchain connection platform saw its security breached and with it the loss of more than $600 million. To everyone’s amazement, the hacker has returned all the money.
“At this point, all user assets that were transferred during the incident have been fully recovered,” Poly Network explains in an official announcement on Medium. The hacker (or groups of hackers) has decided to return all the money, forgoing keeping absolutely none of the proceeds.
The hacker’s intentions we saw from the beginning. After the theft, he contacted Poly Network and started to return some of the money. Almost half of it in the first few hours. Gradually all the money has been returned and now that the $610 million is back in the hands of Poly Network, they are going to proceed to return it to the customers.
Mr. White Hat
This is the nickname Poly Network has given to the hacker, Mr. White Hat. A hacker first indicated that he intended to return the money and that he hoped the company would learn something from it all. Boy, did it learn, they immediately patched the vulnerabilities and promise to tighten security even more?
The company offered the hacker a $50,000 reward if he did not publish the vulnerability. The hacker however insisted that it was better to donate to the technical community that money, which has made more contributions to the security of blockchain technology.
Poly Network has indicated that it will not initiate legal proceedings or any investigation into the Mr. White Hat hacker. Regardless of whether he carried out the largest cryptocurrency theft in history, they want him as a security officer in the company. It is not known whether or not he will accept the offer.
While in the past other thefts were carried out for cash, Mr. White Hat explained in a Q&A session that the reason he did it was none other than “for fun :)”.
