In the recently reported breach, Tapioca Finance an update came from the Tapioca Foundation which is ready to offer a bounty of $ 1 million to the bad actors that wiped out millions in cryptocurrencies on October 18, 2024.
The bounty was directly offered to the malicious actors responsible for the theft. The firm wrote that they (a single individual or group of people) can take $1 million in Tether and can walk away, per an on-chain message.
Several on-chain analysis firms and the Tapioca Foundation confirmed that the heist was carried out through social engineering techniques.
In social engineering, a mastermind performs many actions to manipulate identified victims in order to gain crucial information(public key, private key, and other details mentioned in the KYC application) that back them to operate a fraudulent activity.
Following the breach a sudden decline was observed in the trading prices of Tap Token as of writing it was trading at $0.01996 mirroring the decline of 98.74% in the past seven days. It is worth noting that before this breach incident, the token was trading above the mark of $1.20.
Matt Marino the co-founder of Topica said following their recovery process that Topica has succeeded in hacking the hacker and recovered 1000 Ether.
Even after this recovery the prices of the Tap token remain steady and have lost almost 98% of its trading price, but finance analyst claims that a reversal might trigger in the prices in the coming week which might help to recover the prices and reach near to 1 dollar.
The total losses are estimated at roughly $4.5 million in crypto however the firm managed to recover 1000 ETH worth $2706779.91 as of writing. On the day of the breach, it was also noted that the Topica Foundation was working closely with blockchain analysis firms and other similar firms to track down the funds’ designation.
Bad Actors’ Intents to Return Funds!
As per industry experts, the amount offered by the firm in bounty to the unethical hackers is considerably higher than what has been offered by other firms in similar cases. In the past few similar incidents, the ratio of the lost amount was comparatively higher than the amount recovered from the hackers.
In dozens of hack and breach cases, hackers have returned the amount of stolen funds in exchange for a bounty but the response by the hackers over the on-chain message is still awaited by the victimized decentralized finance.
None of the top hacking firms has claimed their involvement in this hack but it is widely speculated that the heists might be having some direct or indirect ties with the Lazarus Group, one famous for their attacks on blockchain-based products.
From 2024 until Q3 2024, the wider crypto market has lost over $1.30 billion in digital currencies in 200+ hacks, breaches, and scams. The hack of the Indian-based crypto exchange is among the most destructive attacks in the industry.
Technology experts argue that to avoid such incidents leading firms should focus more on practices such as employing white hat hackers and other experts to test and fund venerability in their protocols.
