In a surprising turn of events, the Munchables hacker has decided to return $62.8 million worth of Ether that was stolen in an exploit without requesting a ransom. The hack, which occurred on March 26, involved a North Korean engineer working for the Munchables team under the handle “Werewolves0943.”
The Ethereum-based nonfungible token (NFT) game Munchables was the target of the hack, with over 17,400 ETH being taken from the GameFi app. Munchables immediately began tracking the stolen funds with the help of blockchain detectives like ZachXBT and PeckShield.
The exploit was traced back to a developer within the Munchables team who had updated the Lock contract just before the launch of the game, allowing the attacker to assign themselves a balance of 1,000,000 Ether. Despite the premeditated nature of the attack, the hacker ultimately decided to return the stolen funds after an hour of negotiations.
Pacman, the inventor of the Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Blast, expressed gratitude to ZachXBT for his assistance in recovering the funds. A total of $97 million has been secured in a multisig by Blast core contributors, with plans to distribute the recovered funds back to users.
In the wake of the hack, Munchables is urging victims to be cautious of reimbursement scams and to only follow correspondence from official sources. This incident comes just days after a similar hack on decentralized finance aggregator ParaSwap, where a hacker compromised addresses and took approximately $24,000 before the funds were recovered.
With the help of white hat hackers, ParaSwap was able to rectify the issue and secure affected addresses. The vulnerability impacted 386 addresses in total, with some users still needing to revoke permits for the defective contract.
The return of the stolen funds by the Munchables hacker marks a rare instance of a cybercriminal having a change of heart. As the investigation into the hack continues, the Munchables team and Blast developers are working together to ensure the security of the platform and its users.
