- The growing trend of negotiating with hackers skyrockets in DeFi
- SafeMoon hacker agrees to refund 80% of drained funds.
- SafeMoon Hacker claims they accidentally drained the funds they took.
According to information from SafeMoon developers, the hacker would be permitted to keep 20% of the money he stole in light of the recent hack on the service.
According to a blockchain message posted by the group at SafeMoon, the hacker allegedly stole $8.9 million worth of Binance Coin from the site and negotiated an agreement with the company to give back 80% of the assets.
SafeMoon is a decentralized financial system that uses the BNB chain; on March 28, 2019, an unsuccessful hack attempt on the platform resulted in the loss of 27,000 BNB, valued at around $8.9 million at the time.
SafeMoon’s deployer account sent the following data in 8-bit Unicode Transformation format (UT-8) through a transaction posted to the BNB network on April 18 with the hacker’s address as the recipient.
“SafeMoon has agreed with the party currently withholding the funds. Specifically, SafeMoon has decided to accept an 80% return of the token amount, with the other party retaining the remaining 20% as a bounty.
SafeMoon has also agreed not to take any further legal actions against them. After carefully considering the surrounding circumstances, SafeMoon has decided this decision is the best for the company and its community.”
The coded message posted is the latest communication between the hacker and the SafeMoon team, as both parties are attempting to settle, especially after the hacker claimed they had not intentionally drained the funds.
The team at SafeMoon responded to the hacker on the same day they dropped the message and asked for a telegram handle where the hacker could be contacted. Still, they designed to provide one and instead offered an anonymous Outlook email address. The team responded, “Email message sent, 12:33 UTC.”
The blockchain communication between both sides ended when they received a message on April 18 confirming the agreement.
It has become a common trend in the DeFi space of recent to hack DeFi protocols and then negotiate to keep a certain percentage of the stolen funds. A recent example is Euler Finance, whose hacker drained funds worth $196 million from the platform and then issued an apology message before refunding nearly all the funds they took from the hack.
Likewise, on April 6, an exploiter who drained out $967,000 worth of crypto from Sentiment protocol also returned nearly 90% of the drained funds after the team reached an agreement with them on keeping the remaining percentage.
Conclusion
Due to the recent attacks and negotiations with hackers in a bid to retrieve back stolen funds, web 3 developers are arguing that there should be more enormous bug bounties, with more diligence from the development team towards paying them to avoid more cases like this from springing up.
