Verus offered to drop investigations and not press charges if the attacker returned the stolen funds within a 24-hour time limit.
The exploit that drained the Verus-Ethereum bridge of over $11 million returned $8.5 million to the project team, keeping $2.8 million as a white hat bounty.
This comes just one day after the Verus community and its developers offered a bounty for the hacker meeting a set of conditions.
Hacker accepts $2.8 million reward
The incident occurred on May 17 with the hacker take Taking advantage of a missing verification step on one of the cross-chain bridge contracts, which allowed them to drain approximately 103.6 tBTC, 1,625 ETH, and 147,000 USDC. After the hack, the project team decided to shut down block-producing nodes to prevent further transfers and issued an emergency patch.
The real side He said On social media, it announced that it had offered an Ethereum bridge exploiter a reward of 1,350 ETH for returning 4,052 ETH within 24 hours, adding that it would halt any investigations and not press charges if the conditions were met.
“If you return a total of 4,052.4 ETH to address 0xF9AB…C1A74 within the 24 hours specified above, we will understand this as your agreement to these terms, and we will adhere to our stated agreement to cease further investigation of you,” the team wrote.
Blockchain security company PeckShieldAlerts has since I mentioned The hacker transferred 4,052 ETH to the team’s address, recovering 75% of the stolen funds while retaining a 25% reward of 1,350 ETH. However, Verus has not yet issued an official acknowledgment of the recovery on its platforms as stated in its initial statement.
The developer points out the possibility of using artificial intelligence in hacking
The update comes as the cryptocurrency sector deals with a rise in the number of bridge exploits, with the Verus incident being the eighth such incident this year. According to PeckShield, attackers have stolen a total of $328.6 million from several cross-chain protocols such as THORchain, ZetaChain, KelpDAO, HyperBridge, CrossCurve, Squid Router, and IoTeX.io as of mid-May.
But the Verus case is noteworthy because the complexity of the exploit suggests that the hackers are using artificial intelligence to help carry it out. The main developer of the protocol, Mike Totongi, He explained In an article, how technology helped them understand the rules of the system closely enough to design transactions that bypassed checks and tricked Ethereum nodes into accepting malicious cross-chain transfer.
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Elsewhere, Vitalik Buterin subscriber Insights into how AI can be used to enhance security rather than break it. In response to community concerns about the technology creating ongoing exploitative opportunities, the Ethereum co-founder responded by saying that formal AI-assisted verification can be used as a strong defense against security failures in the cryptocurrency industry.
