The Poloniex cryptocurrency exchange platform has just joined the long list of hacked sites of the same type. Justin Sun, the founder of decentralized finance platform Tron, which also owns Poloniex, confirmed the hack on X (formerly Twitter).
According to online accounts, Poloniex, one of the oldest cryptocurrency exchangers, lost the equivalent of 130 million or $116 million in the deal. “We are investigating the incident,” assures Justin Sun in a tweet dated November 10.
We are currently investigating the Poloniex hack incident. Poloniex maintains a healthy financial position and will fully reimburse the affected funds. Additionally, we are exploring opportunities for collaboration with other exchanges to facilitate the recovery of these funds.
— HE Justin Sun 孙宇晨 (@justinsuntron) November 10, 2023
“Healthy financial situation”
And to ensure that the exchange platform maintains “a healthy financial situation” and that it will “fully reimburse” the funds that may have been stolen. In another tweet, the executive claims that assets associated with the hacker’s addresses may have been frozen. “At present, losses are within manageable limits,” he says.
The amount indicated would make this attack one of the largest cryptoasset hacks of the year, behind that of Mixin Networkin September, which suffered a loss of around $200 million after falling victim to an attack on its cloud provider.
A type of attack of which North Korean hackers from the Lazarus Group are generally suspected. According to the FBI, the latter are responsible for the theft of the equivalent of more than 200 million dollars in 2023.
Wild bug bounty
The attack which targeted the Euler Finance protocol in March 2023 initially resulted in similar damage. The hacker behind the theft, however, returned 90% of the stolen funds, after negotiating an agreement with the developers. On X, he had explain a few months later having identified the flaw after having found… a first vulnerability, which had earned him 50,000 dollars.
In wanting to correct this, the developers then introduced a new flaw. Which he took advantage of shamelessly this time. An unethical outcome clearly hoped for by Poloniex. Justin Sun offered the hacker a 5% bonus and a seven-day cooling-off period before taking legal action.