The decentralized finance platform Poly Network was under a huge $600M heist last week, offers on Tuesday the mystery hacker known as ‘Mr. White Hat’, to become chief security advisor

The proposal of 17th August was the latest twist in an account that began about a week ago which has captivated the world of digital assets. Mr. White Hat absquatulated with the digital tokens after exploiting a weakness in Poly Network’s system, and later vowed to return them.

‘Mr White Hat’ has claimed to be an ethical hacker who looks for flaws in networks rather than being motivated by money. Poly said on Tuesday, “We are grateful for Mr White Hat’s outstanding contribution to Poly Network’s security enhancements.” Returning of the funds is still its priority, “thus, we sincerely hope Mr White Hat can understand our appeal and continue to actively co-operate with us,” he added.

On a shocking turn Poly claimed it “has no intension of holding Mr White Hat legally responsible” for the hack, after its previous decision to take legal action. The bounty of $500,000 which offered in return for discovering the weaknesses in their system, is rejected by the hacker. On that account Poly stated, “We truly hope that no future projects and industry successors have to experience any similar incidents.”

The communication between the hacker and Poly have been made publicly through messages accompanying transactions performed on the Ethereum blockchain, which can be seen by anyone with basic software.

Most importantly, the Poly Network heist incident has also shown the struggle for hacked networks in retrieving their assets as the computer code on which the networks rely has no legal status. The Director of technology at Darktrace, the world leading AI cyber security company, Andrew Tsonchev commented, “It means there is little law enforcement can do ‘post-hack’ to disrupt operations. Once a token or currency has been stolen, there is no way to recover it, it’s gone.”

Joyashree Dey

CBW - External Analyst

INDIA