27 Million Dollar Penpie Hack: A Message of Appreciation from Hacker Euler
One of the biggest hacking events in the crypto world was the $27 million Penpie attack, which attracted the attention of the famous Euler Finance hacker. After this incident, the hacker made an interesting reaction to other criminals and praised the decision not to return the stolen funds.
On September 3, 2024, the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol called Penpie suffered a major cyber attack. As a result of this attack, the platform lost $27 million in digital assets. Following the incident, Penpie temporarily suspended both deposits and withdrawals. These measures were taken to prevent further harm to users.
However, the attacker soon took a big step and sent the stolen $7 million to a crypto mixer called Tornado Cash. Crypto mixers serve to provide anonymity by combining digital asset transactions with other funds. Although such services are generally used to protect users’ privacy, they are also a frequently used method for laundering stolen funds by hackers.
After the Penpie hack, the hacker responsible for this attack exchanged an on-chain message with the person responsible for the $195 million flash loan attack on Euler Finance in March 2023.
The Euler Finance hacker praised the Penpie hacker for his decision not to return the stolen funds and told him, “Good job bro, I haven’t seen a hack like this in a long time. I’m glad you got the money in full and prevented the retrieval of what you stole. You won, they lost. Good job,” he sent a message.
However, the Euler Finance hacker was not so lucky. On March 15, 2023, Euler Finance made an offer to the hacker that would allow him to keep approximately $ 20 million of the stolen funds. The offer was conditioned on the return of 90% of the stolen funds. Additionally, the protocol offered a reward of $1 million to anyone who could help catch the hacker.
As a result, the Euler Finance hacker returned all recoverable funds and the protocol recovered 90% of the stolen amount. Following this development, the Euler Foundation stopped the $1 million reward campaign launched to catch the hacker.
More than 9,000 people lost nearly $63 million due to crypto phishing scams in August. Although there was a decrease in the number of victims, the amount stolen increased by 215%. Most of this large amount stolen was due to a large-scale attack that resulted in a loss of $55 million.
On August 20, a wallet owner transferred ownership of 55 million Dai by signing a malicious transaction. This transaction allowed fraudsters to steal large amounts of funds.
This incident once again revealed how widespread and dangerous the security vulnerabilities and cyber crimes in the crypto world are. The crypto industry continues to develop stronger security measures and auditing mechanisms against such events.
