In a surprising turn of events, the Munchables hacker, who is actually a Munchables developer, had a change of heart and returned $62.8 million worth of stolen Ether (ETH) without demanding a ransom. The whole process took nearly eight hours to complete.
On March 26, Munchables, an Ethereum-based nonfungible token (NFT) game, reported a hack that resulted in the loss of over 17,400 ETH from their GameFi app. Munchables, along with blockchain investigators PeckShield and ZachXBT, immediately began tracking the movement of the stolen funds in an attempt to intercept them.
ZachXBT revealed that the exploit was the result of the Munchables team hiring a North Korean developer called “Werewolves0943.” However, on March 27 at 4:40 am UTC, Munchables identified the hacker as one of their own developers. After an hour of negotiations, the former developer agreed to return the stolen funds voluntarily.
The creator of the Ethereum layer-2 blockchain, Blast, who goes by the pseudonym Pacman, expressed his gratitude to ZachXBT for his assistance. Pacman announced that the ex-Munchables developer had chosen to return all the funds without any ransom demands.
Since Munchables was built on the Blast blockchain, Pacman will collaborate with the Munchables team to help redistribute the recovered funds. In the meantime, victims of the hack are advised to only trust official sources for communication to avoid falling for refund scams.
In a related incident, a hacker stole approximately $24,000 from four different decentralized finance (DeFi) aggregator ParaSwap addresses, just four days before the Munchables hack. However, ParaSwap managed to recover the funds with the help of white hat hackers and began the process of refunding affected users.
The ParaSwap team successfully resolved the issue by revoking permissions for the vulnerable AugustusV6 smart contract. Out of the 386 addresses affected by the vulnerability, 213 addresses have yet to revoke allowances for the flawed contract as of March 25.
As the world of cryptocurrency continues to grow, it is essential for users to be cautious and aware of potential risks, such as scams and hacks, when engaging with new platforms like Solana memecoins.