"'Critical' Polygon bug put $24 billion in tokens at risk until recent hard fork"
Primary Source ↗Incident Details
Polygon lost a bit over $2 million after a hacker exploited a bug involving a lack of balance/allowance check in their MRC20 contract. Polygon had been in the process of releasing a patch for the vulnerability, which had been reported by a white-hat hacker, and released an emergency upgrade the following day. The silent, zero-warning hard fork raised some eyebrows, and Polygon didn’t release details until several weeks later. Polygon ultimately paid about $3.5 million in bug bounties to two white-hat hackers who submitted reports, which was far less than the total value of Polygon’s $MATIC tokens, all 9.2 billion of which (worth around $24 billion) could have been stolen by an attacker using this vulnerability.
Total loss estimated at $2,068,130.
Technical Details
- Initial Attack Vector
- Software bug / unintentional loss
- Vendor / Product
- Polygon
Timeline
- 2021-12-04 Breach occurred
- 2021-12-04 Publicly disclosed