Justin Sun has offered a 5% white hat bounty to the hacker responsible for the recent Poloniex exchange exploit, which resulted in the theft of $125 million worth of cryptocurrency. Sun, who acquired Poloniex in 2019, took to Twitter to extend the offer, urging the hacker to return the assets to their original wallets within a week.

Sun’s tweet read: “We are offering a 5% white hat bounty to the Poloniex hacker. Please return the funds to the following ETH/TRX/BTC wallets. We will give you 7 days to consider this offer before we engage law enforcement.” The provided wallet addresses include ETH Wallet (0x176F3DAb24a159341c0509bB36B833E7fdd0a132), TRX (TUgSgCQL6pMSy9zByn4sgxqrJa95sZExBG), and BTC (14XKsv8tT6tt8P8mfDQZgNF8wtN5erNu5D).

Justin Sun

Sun made it clear that if the hacker fails to comply within the specified timeframe, law enforcement will be involved. Furthermore, Sun assured the crypto community that Poloniex would fully reimburse the stolen funds and collaborate with other exchanges to recover the assets.

“We are currently investigating the Poloniex hack incident. Poloniex maintains a healthy financial position and will fully reimburse the affected funds. Additionally, we are exploring opportunities for collaboration with other exchanges to facilitate the recovery of these funds.”

According to cybersecurity firm PeckShield, the hacker managed to make off with $56 million in Ethereum (ETH), $48 million in TRX, and $18 million in Bitcoin (BTC). The stolen assets also included various altcoins such as VGX (Voyager), PEPE, MATIC (Polygon), AAVE, TUSD (TrueUSD), LINK (Chainlink), and more.

Source: PeckShield

The on-chain data reveals that the stolen assets were swiftly converted and transferred to multiple addresses. The hacker even managed to move significant amounts from the TRON address before it was frozen, including 21.73 million USDT, 14.05 million USD BTC, 3.65 million USDD, and 1.78 million USD USDC, totaling over $42.83 million. Currently, only $6.54 million remains frozen.

The origin of the hack has not been officially disclosed by Poloniex. However, X-explore suggests that the exchange’s private key might have been compromised, pointing out the similarities with the crypto casino Stake hack in September. The movements of funds in the Poloniex incident mirror the earlier hack, involving different tokens stored in separate addresses, each handling a specific type of token. Additionally, the hacker used intermediary addresses to swap ERC-20 and TRC-20 tokens on DEX before transferring ETH/TRX to a new address.

Source: https://azcoinnews.com/justin-sun-offers-5-white-hat-bounty-in-response-to-125-million-poloniex-hack.html