“I don’t need the money”: Hacker returns more and more loot


“I don’t need the money”
Hackers are returning more and more loot

More than half of the $ 600 million stolen are back after the attack on the Poly Network crypto platform. With the stolen goods, the hacker also provides an explanation for his act. Obviously, greed for money is not one of his motives.

The hacker behind one of the biggest attacks on cryptocurrencies to date has returned more than half of his loot. So far, stolen digital money worth 342 million US dollars has surfaced again, the decentralized crypto platform Poly Network announced on Twitter.

About $ 268 million was still missing. The thief had stolen tokens worth more than 600 million US dollars in an attack on the platform and began to return the stolen property yesterday. Blockchain experts pointed out that it may be too difficult for the hacker to launder stolen cryptocurrencies in this volume.

There are increasing indications that in this case the hacker wanted to point out the weak point in the technical protocol of Poly Network with a drastic action. Traces that Tom Robinson, co-founder of Elliptic, a London-based company specializing in blockchain analysis and compliance, discovered in the hacker’s publicly viewable transfers also point in this direction.

“The only way to maintain dignity”

Robinson published a three-page question and answer session on Twitter, which the hacker had published in the form of a self-interview. In it he claims that he is not very interested in the money. He always planned to return the amounts. The theft was supposed to show the weaknesses in the software from Poly Network. “I know it hurts when people are attacked, but shouldn’t they learn something from these hacks?” The hacker wrote in the notes. He transferred the “tokens” to keep them safe, but did not sell any of them.

In his remarks, the hacker also addresses the question of why he did not return the stolen assets in one go: “I needed time to talk to the Poly Networks team. Sorry, that is the only way to protect my dignity without revealing my identity. And I had to rest a bit. ”

There are always crypto thefts from so-called decentralized financial platforms (DeFi) – from January to July alone, it was a volume of 474 million US dollars. The largely unregulated services enable users to trade values ​​such as Bitcoin with one another without the need for exchanges or banks. Proponents of the decentralized approach speak of free access to financial services. However, the sector has so far hardly been regulated. There are also technical deficiencies on some platforms.

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