The decentralized exchange protocol has managed to recuperate funds in the aftermath of a security breach last week.
Following the initial attack, KyberSwap reported a total loss of $47 million from its concentrated liquidity pools.
In a recent development, a partial recovery of funds has been achieved through negotiations with the operators of front-running bots. Approximately $5.7 million in cryptocurrency, taken from KyberSwap pools on the Polygon and Avalanche networks during the hack, has now been reclaimed, as reported by the exchange.
According to the negotiated agreement, the bot operators committed to returning 90% of the misappropriated funds to a specified KyberSwap address on the Polygon network. As an incentive, a 10% bounty was offered to the operators for their cooperation in the recovery process, resulting in KyberSwap reclaiming a total of $4.67 million.
As per KyberSwap’s update, the recovered funds comprise 361.92 axl-wstETH ($870.5k), 441.8 WETH ($919k), 261.5 wstETH ($624k), 711,430.9 WMATIC ($547.8k), 443,011.6 USDT ($443k), 385,630.7 USDC ($385.6k), and 65,130 USDT (~$65.1k).
The hacker specifically targeted KyberSwap’s Elastic pools, impacting funds across various blockchains such as Arbitrum, Optimism, Ethereum, Polygon, and Binance Smart Chain.
It’s worth noting that this negotiation is distinct from discussions with the primary hacker of the initial event, who had previously shown a willingness to enter into talks. Despite the team proposing a white hat bounty, it appears that progress in those negotiations has not been achieved thus far.
The hacker took advantage of a vulnerability linked to the tick interval boundaries within KyberSwap’s concentrated liquidity pools. Exploiting this weakness, the hackers artificially inflated liquidity, causing a depletion of assets from the pools.
After the initial recovery of funds, KyberSwap issued reassurances to its users, pledging to make every effort to recover the remaining stolen funds.
“Following this successful retrieval of users’ funds from the frontrun bots, we remain committed to supporting law enforcement and cybersecurity efforts to trace and recover users’ funds from the perpetrator of the exploit attack,” stated KyberSwap.
