Cryptocurrency company Wormhole suffered a $320 million theft in one of the biggest hacking attacks made public so far, but said on Thursday that all resources had been restored.
Decentralized finance website Wormhole, which allows the transfer of information across cryptocurrency networks, claimed that the attack involved 120,000 tokens connected to the ether cryptocurrency.
At the time of the theft announcement, the day before, the market value of the tokens was just over $320 million.
The theft was the biggest to hit the unregulated segment of decentralized finance, known as DeFi.
DeFi platforms allow users to borrow, borrow and hold deposits, often in cryptocurrencies, bypassing traditional financial sector entities such as banks.
“All funds have been restored and Wormhole is back in business,” the platform said on Twitter. Earlier, the company said on Telegram that “all resources were saved”.
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All funds have been restored and Wormhole is backed up.
We’re deeply grateful for your support and thank you for your patience.
— Wormhole🌪 (@wormholecrypto) February 3, 2022
Wormhole did not provide details on how it recovered the funds and did not respond to multiple Reuters contacts. Like many DeFi sites, Wormhole does not provide information about its location, control or corporate structure.
“’All resources have been restored’. Like? Who will pay for it in the end?” asked one user on Telegram.
“The team is working on a detailed incident report and will share it as soon as possible,” replied one of the Wormhole channel admins on Telegram.
Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic claimed that hackers managed to create nearly 94,000 fraudulent wETH tokens, which were transferred to ethereum, the infrastructure behind ether transactions.
Elliptic added that Wormhole offered the hacker a ransom of $10 million to recover the funds, citing messages embedded in ether transactions sent to his digital address.
Fraud and theft on DeFi platforms exceeded $10 billion last year, according to Elliptic.
In August, hackers behind the biggest publicized cryptocurrency theft so far returned nearly the entire $610 million they stole from the DeFi Poly Network website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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