Thieves recently made off with valuable Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs worth nearly $3 million in a Dec. 16 hack of peer-to-peer trading platform NFT Trader.
But a bounty payment of 120 Ether, worth around $267,000, has secured the return of all the stolen digital assets in under 24 hours.
The hacker had publicly demanded ransom for the NFTs’ return. “If you want these NFT’s back then you need to pay me 120 ETH […],” they wrote.
A community effort headed by non-profit Boring Security coordinated the bounty payment, recovering all 36 BAYC and 18 MAYC NFTs by Saturday morning. Co-founder of BAYC creator Yuga Labs, Greg Solano, fronted the funds.
The exploit stemmed from a platform upgrade 11 days prior that enabled unauthorized NFT transfers due to previously granted trading permissions, explained “Foobar,” founder of Delegate. He assisted the NFT Trader team in halting the attack.
With the stolen NFTs now back in their owners’ hands free of charge, Foobar and others advised revoking approvals granted to old NFT Trader contracts to protect against potential repeat attacks.
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