Colossal cyber heist: Poly Networks lose $600 million

Cybercriminals are becoming more audacious by the day. Poly Network, decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, reports hackers stole well over half a billion dollars worth of funds.

According to Reuters, the hack appears to be among the biggest in DeFi, peer-to-peer cryptocurrency platforms that allow transactions without traditional gatekeepers such as banks or exchanges. Poly Network allows users to swap tokens across different blockchains.

Reports show that the stolen amount of $600 million surpasses the criminal losses DeFi sector witnesses during the whole year so far. Reuters reports that criminal losses in January-July amounted to $474 million.

Poly Network announced on Twitter it will take legal action and urged hackers to return stolen assets. The company also advised people to blacklist tokens from wallets where the attack perpetrators transferred the stolen money.

“We call on miners of affected blockchain and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens coming from the above addresses,” the Poly Networks team wrote.

According to Reuters, the company had frozen $33 million connected with the hack, and top management at large crypto exchanges responded to Poly Network on Twitter, saying that they would try to help.

Poly Networks was launched by the founder of the Chinese blockchain project Neo, which operates on the Binance Smart Chain as well as Eherum and Polygon blockchains.

Assets stolen include $253 million in tokens on Binance Smart Chain, $266 million in Ethereum tokens, and $85 million in USDC on Polygon network.

The massive heist will undoubtedly have an impact on the DeFi sector as a heist this large can significantly diminish trust in various platforms’ ability to keep the money safe.

Bobby Ong, co-founder of crypto analytics website CoinGecko, told Reuters that Poly Networks might not recover from the blow at all, as regaining user confidence after losing so much money is unlikely.

The company is fighting to get back as much money as possible. The company claims to have reclaimed close to $5 million, less than 1% of what was stolen.

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