DeFi yet again entered into the hackers’ crosshairs as cross-chain DeFi platform pNetwork got attacked on September 19. The attack resulted in a loss of roughly $12.7 million worth of Bitcoin.
The exchange, running on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), reported about the attack shortly after it, noting that a total of 277 tokenized BTC were stolen from the exchange.
“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,” the exchange announced in a Twitter post.
The team at pNetwork is already developing and deploying a bug fix while offering a massive $1.5 million bounty if the hacker returns the stolen funds. The $1.5 million bounty equals 11% of the total funds stolen.
The series of Twitter posts the pNetwork team published explained further about the actions the team took after the hack. First, pNetwork stopped all of its cross-chain bridges in order to reduce the risk of another attack. Second, all bridges were extensively reviewed for the exact bug and similar exploits. As of press time the pBTC on EOS, pBTC on Telos, and pLTC on EOS bridges are running with an extra layer of security measures, which may result in longer than usual processing times for pNetwork users.
In turn, after the attack the pNetwork governance token – PNT dropped 18% in price over the past 24 hours.
pNetwork’s attack marks yet another hit against the DeFi ecosystem in 2021. THORChain got attacked in a similar fashion, with the hackers stealing as much as $7.6 million worth of cryptos in July. However, THORChain got hacked again just two weeks later, this time the damage totaling $8 million.
Binance Smart Chain also got its fair share of hacker attacks and exploits in 2021, as the list of BSC exploits includes PancakeBunny, Cream Finance, bEarn, Bogged Finance, Uranium Finance, Meerkat Finance, SafeMoon, Spartan Protocol, BurgerSwap, Belt Finance, with pNetwork being the latest addition.
Binance Smart Chain also became notorious for the blockchain behind PolyNetwork, which saw more than $600 million stolen from the platform. However, in PolyNetwork’s case, the hacked returned nearly all of the stolen funds.