White Hat Hacker Rewarded $75,000 for Saving User Funds

After over a month, Immunefi has released the inquest into the bug that was identified by a white hat hacker on the Polygon blockchain. The firm announced a reward of $75,000 to the hacker for the display of altruism and attention to detail.

Immunefi, a bug bounty platform, revealed via a “Bugfix Review” that Polygon’s team had successfully fixed the bug that was identified by Niv Yehezkel. The white hacker alerted the team after the discovery of a vulnerability in Polygon’s smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain on January 15th.

According to the report, Polygon’s team swung into action, designating the bug with a high severity level and saving billions of dollars of assets in the process. Immunefi’s report notes that for the bug to have been exploited, blackhat hackers would first have to meet certain “impossible” conditions like the availability of a validator spot and maintaining the cost of the spot. 

“We would like to thank whitehat Niv Yehezkel for doing an amazing job and reporting this finding. Props also to the Polygon team for patching and paying out the bug,” read the report. “The issue was reported responsibly and securely via the Immunefi platform, leading to a happy outcome for everyone, especially the users.”

As a reward for his services, Yehezkel was rewarded with $75,000 and took to Twitter to thank Immunefi and Polygon for the swift patching of the bug. This is not the first time that the Polygon team would have had to patch a potential exploit on the platform. 

In October, the team paid a $2 million bounty to a white hat hacker that spotted a bug that could have cost user losses of $1.6 million and in December, it paid $3.46 million after another patch.

The Rise Of White Hat Hackers

White hat Hackers have been playing their own part in safeguarding the nascent cryptocurrency ecosystem for potential exploits. Early this week, Coinbase paid its “largest-ever bug bounty” of $250,000 to Tree of Alpha, a hacker that found a flaw in the platform’s advanced trading feature. 

Moreover, after the Poly Network hacker returned the assets in “good faith”, the team offered a reward of $500,000 and a position as the platform’s “Chief Security Advisor.”

As part of the efforts to protect investor funds, Immunefi prides itself as being Web 3’s leading bug bounty platform. According to its website, it has paid over $10 million as a reward and has averted potential losses of over $20 billion since its launch.

What do you think about this subject? Write to us and tell us!