It was on Tuesday that crypto exchange PolyNetwork announced this I was attacked by a pirate.
About 600 million dollars, roughly 5.4 billion Norwegian kroner, was lost in various cryptocurrencies. The attack was described as the largest in history, affecting tens of thousands of cryptocurrency owners.
Pay off billions
The Vekslingsbanken website publicly announced a letter to the hackers, in which they wrote that they wanted to establish contact.
“It is not wise to make more transactions. You should talk to us to get a solution,” Polly Network wrote.
The exchange bank asked the hackers to return the stolen values to several digital addresses of the bank, and also indicated that they would take legal action against the hackers.
It may seem that it helped.
According to the analysis firm Chainanalysis, hackers have paid off about $260 million in cryptocurrency, or NOK 2.4 billion. Reuters.
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difficult to wash
Tom Robinson, founder of Elliptic, which analyzes blockchains, says that the reason they pay dividends is likely how hard it is to launder stolen cryptocurrencies of this magnitude.
“Even if you can steal cryptocurrencies, laundering and paying them is very difficult due to the transparency of the blockchain and the fact that financial institutions are using blockchain analytics on a large scale,” Robinson told Reuters.
Blockchain is the technology that enables cryptocurrencies to function as a viable currency, because everyone connected to the blockchain can see what is being done in the system, which means that the value cannot be manipulated.
There must have been a weakness in the security system that allowed the hackers to enter and carry out the attack.
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“Probably planned”
When the hackers obtained the values, they sent them to several different cryptocurrency addresses. There are three addresses, analysts at security firm SlowMist say, writes CNBC.
In a Twitter message, the company wrote that it “found the attackers’ email. IP address and device fingerprint” and that they “follow potential identity traces.”
The company’s analysts concluded that the theft “may have been planned long ago” and that the hackers were well prepared.
Poly Network has asked for help from other crypto companies, and crypto company Tether has said it has frozen $33 million that could be linked to the hack.
Several of the affected coins received a significant drop in value after the attack became known on Tuesday, among them Ethereum, which plunged more than $100 in price.
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