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SafeMoon hacker consents to return 80% of misappropriated assets, according to development team.
The individual responsible for extracting $8.9 million in Binance Coin (BNB) from SafeMoon has consented to return 80% of the stolen funds, as indicated by a blockchain message from the SafeMoon team dated April 18.
Breaking News: #SafeMoon has reached an agreement with the “hacker”
80% LP return imminent.
20% bounty for “hacker”
And no charges pressed
Now, back to your regularly scheduled program. pic.twitter.com/x94fSb4EoP— SafeMoonSpidey.sfm ⎷ (@SafeMoonSpidey) April 18, 2023
SafeMoon operates as a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol on the BNB Chain. It experienced a hack on March 28, leading to a loss of 27,000 BNB, valued at $8.9 million at that time.
On April 18, at 1:19 p.m. UTC, the SafeMoon Deployer account executed a transaction on the BNB network, designating the attacker’s address as the recipient. This transaction included a coded message in 8-bit Unicode Transformation Format (UTF-8) that conveyed the following:
“SafeMoon has reached an agreement with the party currently holding the funds. Specifically, SafeMoon has agreed to accept 80 percent of the amount returned, with the other party retaining the balance as a bounty. SafeMoon has further agreed not to file any legal actions against them. After careful consideration of the circumstances, it is believed this is in the best interest of SafeMoon and the community.”
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This coded message represents the latest in a series of exchanges between the SafeMoon team and the attacker as they sought to resolve the situation. On March 29, the attacker asserted that the funds were drained unintentionally.
The team replied on the same day, requesting the attacker to provide a Telegram handle for communication. Although the attacker did not share a Telegram handle, they did offer an anonymous Outlook email address. The team then noted, “Email message sent. 12:33 UTC.”
No further blockchain communications occurred between the two parties until the April 18 message confirming the agreement.
Recently, hacking DeFi protocols and negotiating to retain a portion of the funds has become increasingly prevalent. On April 4, the attacker of Euler Finance, who had previously siphoned over $196 million, issued an apology and returned nearly all the funds obtained from the incident. On April 6, the individual who extracted $967,000 in cryptocurrency from Sentiment returned almost 90% of it after the team permitted them to keep the remaining amount.
Some Web3 developers have suggested that bug bounties should be more substantial and that development teams should be more proactive in compensating them, as they argue this could encourage hackers to report vulnerabilities rather than exploit them.
