Defi Hack Alert: This protocol lost over $12 million in Bitcoin (BTC)

The Defi protocol, pNetwork alerted the community of a 277 Bitcoin (BTC) hack, which amounts to 12.67 million in USD. The network revealed that the attacker installed a bug on the Binance Blockchain codebase of pNetwork. However, the protocol confirmed safety for other funds as no more bridges had to bear the burn of the attack.

1/N We’re sorry to inform the community that an attacker was able to leverage a bug in our codebase and attack pBTC on BSC, stealing 277 BTC (most of its collateral).

The other bridges were not affected. All other funds in the pNetwork are safe.

— pNetwork ? (@pNetworkDeFi) September 19, 2021

According to the pNetwork’s Twitter thread, the bug has been identified and the protocol is currently rehabilitating it, to re-activate the bridges once secured, which should take mere hours. The network assures that they are working rigorously towards the solution for their pBTC on BSC holders and will further update of developments. Additionally, the network has even offered a bounty to the hacker worth $1,500,000 upon returning all funds. Nevertheless, the organization highlights that it’s a “long shot”.

“To the black hat hacker. Although this is a long shot, we’re offering a clean $1,500,000 bounty if funds are returned. Finding vulnerabilities is part of the game, unfortunately, but we all want DeFi ecosystem to continue growing, returning funds is a step in that direction.”, pNetwork tweeted.

NowSwap Hack

The Defi hack trend has taken the better of the blockchain system. The latest attack saw the DEX protocol, NowSwap suffer a loss of over $1 million during an attack last week. The attackers stole 535,000 USDT and 158 WETH. USDTs are converted to ETH through the distributed network service, 1inch, and further transferred to the Ethernet Square anonymous trading platform, Tornado Cash.

Defi Hack Frenzy

Multiple protocols have suffered the consequences of the Defi hack frenzy, including CREAM Finance that was exploited for 462,079,976 in AMP tokens and 2,804.96 ETH tokens, and Neko Network that lost over 2 million in Stablecoins. Neko Network attacker’s address obtained 2 million USDT, 390,000 BUSD, and 1 BTCB. Furthermore, the historical hack of PolyNetwork worth $610 million, recently recovered all its funds from the hack. However, it had to travel a long way to refund its users’ stolen funds.

About Author

Journalism & Mass Comm. ‘21 graduate, Palak is a GenZ journalist with background in Lifestyle journalism & PR. At CoinGape, Palak is a junior crypto journalist preparing for Web 3.0