$12M worth of Bitcoin stolen in pNetwork hack

Cross-chain DeFi platform pNetwork has been hacked on Binance Smart Chain to the tune of approximately $12.7 million worth of Bitcoin.

The company says 277 pBTC was drained from the exchange.

The company believe the attack exploited a bug in its codebase. However, it added that it was working to fix the damage.

“The bridges will run with extra security measures in place for the first few days,” it said.

“This means slower transactions processing in exchange for higher security.”

pNetwork also offered to allow the hacker to keep 11.5% of the stolen Bitcoin, if they return the funds.

“To the black hat hacker. Although this is a long shot, we’re offering a clean $1,500,000 bounty if funds are returned,” it pleaded.

“Finding vulnerabilities is part of the game, unfortunately, but we all want DeFi ecosystem to continue growing, returning funds is a step in that direction.”

pNetwork enables the transfer of assets into more than 10 supported blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and many more.

Following the appeal, the price of pNetwork’s governance PNT token went south and has dropped around 17% in the last 24 hours.

Not the first to be hacked

However, this isn’t the first cross-chain platform that has been hacked.

In July, decentralised exchange THORChain went through a $7.6 million lost and, just a few weeks later, it was hacked again for approximately $8 million.

The hacker later  promised to return the funds for a 10% bounty.

Binance Smart Chain has had a significant number of hack cases this year, including PancakeBunny, Cream Finance, Bogged Finance, Uranium Finance, Meerkat Finance, SafeMoon, Spartan Protocol, BurgerSwap, Belt Finance, and pNetwork.

One of the last was a record-breaking Poly Network hack in early August which saw more than $600 million stolen in total. Luckily, the hacker returned the whole amount.

Novak Svrkota, a crypto consultant from the international company Crypto Broker, told Coin Rivet that hacks which are using bugs in DeFi protocols are nothing new but that this thing is one of the main ‘diseases’ of the protocol.

“There is too little attention that creators of the protocol are giving to the security of the whole system and, every day, the systems are becoming more and more complicated,” he said.

“The award in hundreds of millions of dollars is too tempting for the so-called bug-hunters.”

He also added he wasn’t optimistic and that he cannot see a quick solution to the problem except the centralisation of the whole blockchain on which DeFi is built.

“For example, we have Tether blockchain completely pegged to the US dollar and it is much easier for it to return the lost money,” he added.

“As for the Binance Chain, if it doesn’t become centralised, I don’t see the quick solution.”