Negotiations have begun between Kronos Research, a Taipei-based cryptocurrency trading and investment firm, and the hacker who stole $25 million from the company’s treasury earlier this month.
Send back 90% of the funds that were taken, and we’ll close this case, Kronos wrote to the hacker, according to Etherscan show.
The Taiwanese trading and venture capital firm revealed last week that an unauthorised party had obtained access to its API keys in a post on X. Experts on blockchain ZachXBT and Lookonchain subsequently verified that the attacker stole $25 million, primarily in stablecoins.
“At present, we can confirm that the losses are about $26 million in crypto assets, and despite it being a sizable amount, Kronos remains in good standing. All losses will be covered internally, and no partners will be affected,” the firm later posted on X.
On-chain public negotiations between cybercriminals and their targets have grown more frequent.
The attacker who recently signed one of the transactions that took money from the decentralised exchange using a KyberSwap exploit said they would start talks after they were “fully rested.” They were given a 10% bounty by KyberSwap to return the stolen money.
In August, Curve Finance extended an offer to hackers via transaction signing to return the stolen cryptocurrency in exchange for a 10% bounty. DeFiLlama reports that this year, over $1.2 billion has been stolen from Decentralised Finance (DeFi) protocols.