Polygon (MATIC) confirmed that it was compromised and explained what made the network undergo an unexpected update in recent days. The team said that the network was hacked, and the hacker managed to swipe 801,601 MATIC tokens.
In 2021, Matic caught the crypto community’s attention by recording a 13670% increase, and the MATIC token occupies the 14th spot in the top 20. In recent days, Polygon surprised its community by making a hard fork that was not scheduled.
During the early hours of December 5, 2021, the team abruptly released an unannounced update, and that development made the community question the motive behind that sudden upgrade. After nearly a month, Polygon came out on December 30, explaining what had happened on their network. Some whitehat hackers notified Polygon about a vulnerability in the Platform’s PoS genesis contract on December 3.
According to the statement by Polygon:
“A group of whitehat hackers notified Immunefi, which hosts our bug bounty, of a vulnerability in the Polygon PoS genesis contract on Dec. 3.”
By December 4, the team, White hackers, and Immunefi strived relentlessly to fix that vulnerability and began preparations to bring in the necessary update on the token’s core network.
Buy Bitcoin Now“The Polygon core team engaged with the group and Immunefi’s expert team and immediately introduced a fix. The validator and full node communities were notified, and they rallied behind the core devs to upgrade 80% of the network within 24 hours without stoppage.”
Polygon Under Siege
A dangerous hacker was quick to notice that movement in the network and on December 4 the vulnerability was exploited to steal 801,601 MATIC tokens.
“Despite our best efforts, a malicious hacker was able to use the exploit to steal 801,601 MATIC before the network upgrade took effect.”
The Polygon team informed Validators on December 4 that there was an “Emergency Bor Upgrade for Mainnet”. A day later, the mainnet update was completed for +90% validators at Block #22156660. Polygon said that they paid up to $3.46 million as bounty to two white hats who helped in the discovery of that bug. They also stated that the foundation will bear the cost of the theft.
In that context, the Polygon team hopes that their efforts will make the network highly defensive and such incidents will not happen again in the future.
