After losing $100 million in a bridge attack last week, Harmony Protocol has announced a$1 million bounty for the return of stolen funds. It tweeted that Harmony will advocate for no criminal charges when funds are returned.
Hackers on Thursday took off with $100 million in Wrapped Ethereum (WETH), AAVE, SUSHI, DAI, Tether (USDT), and USD Coin and then swapped them for Ethereum. The Harmony team is working with national authorities and forensic specialists to retrieve the stolen funds as they have already found the address of the hacker.
A tweet highlighted that the Horizon bridge was exploited by one or more individuals. The incident drained the bridge of approximately $100 million worth of Ethereum tokens. The platform halted all Horizon bridge activity. Moreover, its native ONE token dipped significantly.
The Harmony team believes the $1 million bounty would be enough to convince the hackers to return the stolen funds. But various watchdogs report that the funds have begun to move into the Tornado Cash Ethereum mixer. This means the hacker is not interested in the bounty. The Tornado Cash mixes a maximum of 100 ETH at a time. Large sums can easily be mixed in just several hours. Mixing is designed to obfuscate the transaction path of coins. As such, it cannot be traced back to previous transactions.
According to PeckShieldAlert, the first and second wallets that received ETH from the exploiter’s primary wallet have completed mixing the coins. Now, there’s 16.3 ETH left. This is too small an amount to be bothered with.
On June 25, Stephen Tse, the founder of Harmony, revealed that the hacker had taken control of the required two Horizon Bridge signees for the multisig address used to secure the funds. The Ethereum side of the bridge that was exploited was moved to a more secure multisig wallet that required four signees.
