Polygon (MATIC) explained what caused the network to undergo a surprise update in recent days.
Polygon Admits The Network Was Hacked, Hacker Swiped 801,601 MATIC Tokens
Matic caught the community’s attention in 2021, recording a 13670% increase in the year. MATIC occupies the 14th position in the top 20.
In recent days, Polygon surprised its users by making a hard fork from nowhere. In the early hours of December 5, 2021, when Polygon’s team suddenly released an unannounced update. This fact led the community to question what motivated this sudden upgrade.
After almost a month, Today Polygon came out to explain what happened on their network. A group of whitehat hackers notified Polygon of a vulnerability in the Polygon PoS genesis contract on Dec. 3.
“A group of whitehat hackers notified Immunefi, which hosts our bug bounty, of a vulnerability in the Polygon PoS genesis contract on Dec. 3.”
As of December 4th, the Polygon team, White hackers, and Immunefi worked hard to fix the vulnerability and started preparation to bring the necessary update on the core network.
“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.”
A malicious hacker was quick to notice the movement in the network, On Dec. 4 the vulnerability was used 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.”
On Dec. 4, The Polygon team informs Validators of an “Emergency Bor Upgrade for Mainnet”. On Dec. 5, the Mainnet update was complete for +90% validators at Block #22156660.
Polygon team said that they paid a total of about $3.46 million as bounty to two white hats who helped discover the bug. The team also confirmed that the foundation will bear the cost of the theft.
The team hopes that their efforts will make the network more defensive and any such incidents will not occur again.
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