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A $75,000 Reward Was Given To a White-Hat Hacker For Saving User Funds

A white-hat hacker found a flaw in the Polygon blockchain, and Immunefi has spent over a month investigating it. The company provided a $75,000 incentive for the hacker who demonstrated benevolence and meticulousness.

In a “Bugfix Review,” Immunefi, a bug bounty platform, claimed that Polygon’s staff has patched the flaw discovered by Niv Yehezkel with great success. January 15th saw the discovery of an issue with Polygon’s Ethereum smart contract by a white hacker.

Apparently, Polygon’s staff sprang into action, putting the issue on high alert and managing to save the company billions of dollars in assets as a result of their quick action. This problem would have only been exploited by blackhat hackers if they were able to obtain and keep a validator slot, which Immunefi says was “impossible” in their study.

Immunefi and Polygon compensated Yehezkel with $75,000 for his efforts, and he thanked them on Twitter for quickly repairing the flaw. A vulnerability in Polygon’s platform has been patched before, so this isn’t something new for them. An unidentified white-hat hacker was paid $2 million in October after discovering a defect that could have caused $1.6 million in losses for the users, and the team paid $3.46 in December after releasing a new fix.

White-Hat Hackers Are Increasing In Number

Coinbase compensated Tree of Alpha, a hacker who discovered a hole in the platform’s advanced trading tool, $250,000 earlier this week. As a reward for their “good faith,” the team awarded the Poly Network hacker $500,000 and the title of “Chief Security Advisor” on the platform. Immunefi claims to be the leading bug bounty platform on Web 3 because of its efforts to protect investment capital. Over $10 million has been given out as a reward and over $20 billion has been saved since its inception, according to its website.

Highlights

  • It has been reported that Niv Yehezkel would receive $75,000 from Immunefi for discovering an exploit that could cause a market collapse.
  • The flaw, which was given a high severity rating, had the potential to cost the company tens of billions of dollars.
  • In recent years, white hat hackers have stepped up their efforts to report defects that could be exploited by criminals.

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