TL;DR
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An ‘moral hacker’ discovered a bug in Kraken’s code, and earlier than reporting it, stole $3M – now they’re asking for much more.
Full Story
There’s nothing worse than making an attempt to do the best factor, after which getting taken benefit of.
Take Erik from Season 16 of Survivor who gave up his immunity necklace, solely to be voted out of the sport minutes later.
(We’re enormous Survivor followers! Don’t @ us).
Questioning how this all pertains to crypto?
The crypto trade, Kraken, simply suffered from an identical destiny to Erik.
As most exchanges do, Kraken affords a bounty program.
(I.e. a approach for ‘moral hackers’ to search out bugs and be paid to inform the trade about them, earlier than the trade will get exploited).
However, an nameless self-proclaimed ‘safety researcher’ lately discovered a essential safety bug and alerted the cryptocurrency trade…after exploiting the bug for $3M.
The place a typical bounty program could pay tens and even lots of of hundreds of {dollars} for locating a bug, $3M is just not even inside the ballpark for Kraken.
In Nicholas Percoco, Chief Safety Officer of Kraken’s phrases: “That is extortion!”
The excellent news is that the safety staff at Kraken have now mounted the bug; and apparently no customers’ funds had been accessed or stolen (the $3M was from Kraken’s treasury fund).
All we will say is, to the ‘safety researcher’ on the market: c’mon – do the best factor and return these funds! The tribe has spoken.
(Too far? Yeah ok).