Stolen digital money worth 342 million US dollars has surfaced again

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 is increasing evidence that in this case the hacker wanted to take drastic action to point out the weak point in Poly Network's technical protocol. Traces that Tom Robinson, co-founder of Elliptic, a London-based company for blockchain analysis and compliance, discovered in the hacker's publicly viewable transfers also point in this direction. 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 didn't 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 repeated 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.