The hacker may have realized he had been discovered and could face charges
A Munchables hacker, also a former developer on the platform, had a change of heart eight hours after stealing $62.8 million worth of Ether. He returned the stolen funds without demanding a ransom.
The Ethereum-based nonfungible token (NFT) game Munchables reported a hack at around 9:30 PM UTC, which drained more than 17,400 ETH from the GameFi app.
Munchables and blockchain investigators, such as ZachXBT and PeckShield, started tracking the stolen funds’ movements to attempt to block them. ZachXBT asserted the exploit originated from the Munchables team, who hired a North Korean developer who goes by the alias “Werewolves0943.”
Munchables identified the hacker on March 27 at 4:40 AM UTC. After negotiating for about an hour, the former developer agreed to return the stolen funds.
Munchables released an official statement saying, “The Munchables developer has shared all private keys involved to assist in recovering the user funds. Specifically, the key which holds $62,535,441.24 USD, the key which holds 73 WETH, and the owner key which contains the rest of the funds.”
Meanwhile, victims of the hack must ensure they only follow communications from official company sources to avoid becoming targets of refund scams.
The exploit happened almost four days after a hacker stole about $24,000 from four different decentralized finance (DeFi) aggregator ParaSwap addresses. The funds were eventually recovered and are being returned to users.
ParaSwap says that 386 addresses were affected by the exposure. However, as of March 25, 213 addresses have yet to revoke privileges for the faulty contract.
