Lending Protocol Sentiment Exploiter Returns Around 90% of Stolen Funds

In a recent turn of events, lending protocol Sentiment has successfully recovered around 90% of stolen funds by offering the hacker a bounty.

The lending protocol used the on-chain transactions on the Arbitrum blockchain to contact the hacker.

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In the message, Sentiment offered the hacker a $95,000 bounty and urged the malicious actor to “do the right thing.” The on-chain message read:

We will offer you $95K and will not pursue this, if you return the money by 8 am UTC 6 April.

Furthermore, in the message, the protocol stated that the bounty would be given to anyone who could assist in identifying and prosecuting the hacker if the funds were not returned.

MetaMask developer Taylor Monahan followed the ongoing situation and revealed that the hacker initially returned 414 Ether (ETH), worth around $771,000. Shortly after that, the hacker sent an additional 51.75 ETH to the recovery address provided by Sentiment.

After these transactions, the lending protocol confirmed the successful retrieval of the stolen funds.

Various on-chain analysts offered differing theories about the nature of the attack that occurred on April 4th. Among the possible explanations were a re-entry attack or a software bug.

Early estimations suggested that the stolen funds amounted to approximately $500,000. However, further investigation by community members revealed that the actual losses were closer to $1 million.

It is not the first time malicious actors choose to return a part of stolen funds to avoid legal actions against them. The hacker who exploited a multi-chain token decentralized finance (DeFi) bridge, Allbridge, returned over $450,000 in crypto.

by Gile K. – Crypto Analyst, BitDegree

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• Source: https://www.bitdegree.org/crypto/news/lending-protocol-sentiment-exploiter-returns-around-90-of-stolen-funds