Poloniex exchange suffers $100M exploit, offers 5% bounty

Over $100 million in digital assets were transferred from a wallet belonging to crypto exchange Poloniex in what security firms believe to be a massive hack.

A crypto wallet belonging to the digital asset exchange Poloniex has experienced suspicious outflows, as seen on blockchain explorer Etherscan. Blockchain security firms believe that the company was breached, leading to as much as $100 million in crypto being drained by the attackers. 

On Nov. 10, millions of crypto assets were transferred from an account labeled Poloniex 4 on Etherscan. Initial estimates of the losses were around $60 million. However, it was later determined that, according to blockchain security firm CertiK, the incident was likely a “private key compromise.” The security firm also noted that the funds have already been transferred to four externally owned accounts (EOAs), with some accounts being swapped into Ether (ETH).

.@Poloniex is suspected to have been hacked.

The Poloniex address '0xA910' transferred all tokens to a new address '0x0A59' in 40 minutes, with a total value of about $60 million.

'0x0A59' is currently transferring funds to more addresses and converting them to $ETH: pic.twitter.com/Kjdw5gIkxa

— Scopescan ( . ) (@0xScopescan) November 10, 2023

In response to the suspicious outflows, the exchange disabled the wallet. However, the exchange has not yet posted an official statement regarding the hack. Cointelegraph also reached out to Poloniex but did not get an immediate response. 

Our wallet has been disabled for maintenance. We will update this thread once the wallet has been re-enabled.

— Poloniex Customer Support (@PoloSupport) November 10, 2023

While the exchange has not published an official statement yet, Justin Sun, who acquired the exchange in 2019, posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the team is already investigating the hacking incident. According to Sun, they will fully reimburse the users affected by the breach. The executive claimed that the exchange “maintains a healthy financial position” and is looking for collaborations with other exchanges to recover the lost funds. 

Related: Exploits, hacks and scams stole almost $1B in 2023: Report

Sun also offered a 5% white hat bounty to the Poloniex hacker. The executive said that they will give the attacker seven days to return the funds before they start working with law enforcement authorities. 

BREAKING
 @Poloniex assets are getting drained, and TRX is pumping hard.
 
In the past hour alone, a Poloniex wallet that contained over $67M in assets is now left with less than $4M.
 
Can someone explain this? pic.twitter.com/3GdiU6JgpI

— Elja (@Eljaboom) November 10, 2023

Meanwhile, despite being hit with a negative incident, Tron (TRX), another of Sun’s crypto projects, has seen a 20% increase in price, according to digital asset information tracker CoinGecko. The cryptocurrency went from trading for $0.09 to $0.11 on the same day as the hack. 

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