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

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 over $100 million was taken by the attackers.

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, with some accounts being swapped into Ether (ETH).

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.

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.

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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.

Meanwhile, despite being hit with a negative incident, Tron (TRX), the native cryptocurrency of one of Sun’s other 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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