Talk about baiting the hunter with prey…
Earlier this week, news broke out of a crypto heist at Poly Network, a cryptocurrency platform in which $610 million was reportedly stolen by a hacker. The network went into a frenzy and deemed it the biggest heist in decentralized finance history. But seems like the hacker wasn’t after money after all and just wanted to teach them a security lesson.
The hacker, who has been termed as ‘Mr. White Hat’, a term used for ethical computer hackers, was offered $500,00 by Poly Network as ‘bug bounty’ to recover the stolen cryptocurrency. Fortunately for the cryptocurrency platform, the hacker wasn’t after the money and voluntarily returned the funds. The hacker, who has been contacting the public using one of the cryptocurrency wallets from which he stole the funds, told them that the heist was purely for ‘fun’ and that he was not interested in money. Instead, he was actually transferring the tokens to keep them safe until the bug in Poly Network’s security system could be resolved. “I would like to give them tips on how to secure their networks so that they can be eligible to manage a billion projects in the future,” commented Mr. White Hat.
As the incident unfolded, Poly Network tried to get on the good side of the hacker and offered them a bounty of $500,000 as a thank you for spotting the bug and helping them improve Poly Network’s security. The hacker has refunded about $340 million worth of assets to the network while the rest is in a joint wallet held by them and Poly Network. The hacker acknowledged the bounty reward offered by Poly Network but has no plans to accept it although the network hopes that Mr. White Hat would continue to cooperate with them in the future as well. “After communicating with Mr. White Hat, we have also come to a more complete understanding regarding how the situation unfolded as well as Mr. White Hat’s original intention,” said in a statement issued by Poly Network.
One of the reasons for not accepting the bug bounty could be that the hacker does not want to get exposed by law enforcement agencies and according to him, prefers to “stay in the dark and save the world.”