A White Hat Hacker Restores 10,000 BNB And Saves 2,500 BNB For His Business Hacking A Transit Swap

White Topi hackers return the stolen funds from Transit Swap. (photo: doc. pixabay)

JAKARTA - On October 10, the decentralized Financial Swap Transit protocol (DeFi) announced that it had reached an agreement with its biggest hackers for refunds.

About a week earlier, a hacker exploited internal bugs in swap contracts in protocols and caused others to be able to replicate security breaches. These breaches caused more than $23 million in losses in user funds.

However, the main hackers have returned about 70% of the exploited funds thanks to the help of security companies such as Lokshield, SnowMist, Bitrace, and Pocket Tokens. They quickly tracked down hackers by identifying their IP addresses, email addresses, and linked chain addresses.

According to the October 10 deal, hackers will return the remaining 10.000 BNB tokens, worth about 2.74 million US dollars, from exploitation in exchange for the release of all legal obligations arising from attacks from Transit Swap. In addition, hackers will store 2,500 BNB (685,600 US dollars) for white hat hacker efforts in uncovering security vulnerabilities.

The Swap Transit team has also set a deadline of October 12 for two hackers and one hacker-arbitrageur to return the stolen funds. After that, developers threatened that "lawful acts" would be taken against them.

Earlier this year, DeFi's exploitation was largely a low-risk and high-value effort thanks to user anonymity. Recently, the emergence of blockchain analytics firms and forensic DeFi companies, coupled with the US ban on crypto-mixer tools such as Tornado Cash, has made it difficult for hackers to launder stolen funds.

Instead, some chose to return funds and save some of the exploited proceeds as a "gift" to uncover security vulnerabilities, such as the Nomad bridge hack.