With the increasing popularity of crypto and defi protocols, malicious activities are also on a rise in the crypto industry. There have been repeated reports of ransomware attacks on various networks, resulting in a loss of millions and even billions of dollars. The anonymity of these attacks make it nearly impossible for any authority to trace back and identify the hackers, and the chances of capital recovery are minimum.
These ransomware attacks are probably one of the most troubling issue of the crypto sector in recent times. Exchanges, networks, and defi protocols from all over the world have found themselves in hot waters over this issue. It is a relatively complicated and difficult issue to tackle. The user sector has also shown its concerns over these hacking incidents, as it not compromises their financial assets but also their data and confidential information.
pNetwork becomes the latest protocol to be targeted by the hackers on BSC
According to the latest reports, the pNetwork has recorded a loss of $12.7m in Bitcoin because of a hacking attempt on the Binance Smart Chain. The pNetwork confirmed the incident through a series of tweets on September 20. A total of 277 pBTC were liquidated from the network by the hackers. The team at pNetwork also explained that this attack was made possible because of a systematic bug in the codebase of the network.
1/N We're sorry to inform the community that an attacker was able to leverage a bug in our codebase and attack pBTC on BSC, stealing 277 BTC (most of its collateral).
The other bridges were not affected. All other funds in the pNetwork are safe.
— pNetwork 🦜 (@pNetworkDeFi) September 19, 2021
The team immediately started working to fix the bug, and also offered 11.5% of funds to the hackers if they returned the stolen funds. pNetwork said that ‘To the black hat hacker. Although this is a long shot, we’re offering a clean $1,500,000 bounty if funds are returned.’ Moreover, the team also took on twitter to apologize for what had happened, and promised that the network’s bridges would now be reactivated after ensuring more security measures. As a result of the incident, the price of pNetwork’s governance token PNT has gone down by a significant 18% within the last 24 hours.
This hacking incident is not the first of this year not the first one on BSC as well. The Binance smart chain has had its share of exploitation in recent times. The long list of affected networks include Pancake Bunny, Cream Finance, Uranium Finance, SafeMoon, BurgerSwap, Spartan Protocol, and now the pNetwork. The BSC was also involved in the record breaking hacking attempts on the Poly Network in August this year.
