Hackers on Tuesday withdrew $611 million in cryptocurrency from the Poly Network DeFi project, using a vulnerability in the system.
The project team called on the exchanges to block the stolen funds.
The multinational blockchain platform Poly Network was hacked on Tuesday. Hackers managed to withdraw $611 million in cryptocurrency, which is the largest theft of digital assets in history.
The funds were transferred by the attackers to various cryptocurrency wallets. Poly Network posted the addresses of the alleged hackers, calling for blocking token transfers from such senders.
The previous anti-record belonged to the Japanese exchange Coincheck, which in 2018 nominally lost over $500 million in NEM tokens, thus surpassing even the infamous Mt.Gox hack.
According to experts, the reason for the hacking was a problem with cryptography — hackers somehow forged the transaction signature to steal funds.
The administration of the platform reported that after an initial investigation, it was possible to detect a vulnerability in the system. It is possible that among the projects interacting with the Poly Network, and there are dozens of such projects, new victims will be found.
One of the Twitter users sent a transaction to one of the addresses containing the stolen funds. In the signature, he warned the hacker that his USDT was blacklisted. In gratitude for the help, the hacker sent $42,000 in ETH to his address. Other users now also send him transactions with congratulations and even recommendations on money laundering.
The Poly Network protocol allows you to transfer tokens between different blockchains. It is developed by an alliance of teams behind the Neo, Ontology and Switcheo blockchain platforms.