Hacker creates 55.6 billion tokens by breaking into cryptocurrency platform

Last night, a cryptocurrency hacker attacked the pNetwork bridge, which allowed the attacker to steal 55.6 billion GALA tokens (about $ 2.2 billion). The hack was reported by pNetwork representatives on Twitter.

1/n pGALA on BSC Notice: A misconfiguration of the https://t.co/Tpj4G7IkUe bridge necessitated the redeployment of pGALA. We’re working directly w/the Gala team and w/ exchanges to provide the necessary pGALA balances to restore functionality of pGALA deposits & withdrawals.

— pNetwork 🦜 (@pNetworkDeFi) November 3, 2022

The hacker sent all the received tokens to the decentralized exchange PancakeSwap to exchange them for BNB. The attacker managed to sell 10.72 billion GALA for 12,977 BNB.

After that, arbitrageurs took over, buying up GALA and sending them to Huobi. As a result, the price of the token fell by another 99% (from $0.04 to $0.0003).

9/n Newly bought pGALA on pancakeswap are not redeemable for pGALA at 1:1 so they don’t track the real GALA tokens value. GALA on Ethereum and on major exchanges is unaffected

— pNetwork 🦜 (@pNetworkDeFi) November 3, 2022

Representatives of the pNetwork have already promised to introduce a new pGALA token in the BSC network. The cryptocurrency will be sent to everyone who owned GALA before the attack. The pNetwork emphasized that GALAs purchased on Pancakeswap cannot be exchanged for new tokens because they do not reflect the real value of the asset.

Probably, the hackers hope to repeat their October success, when they managed to steal $ 657.2 million in a month — a third of the stolen funds for the entire 2021. Thus, in just 13 days in October, attackers managed to steal more digital assets than in any other month in 2022. In 13 days, fraudsters attacked 11 cryptocurrency platforms and received $ 718 million — 4 exploits worth $ 122 million occurred on October 11 alone.