Two suspects arrested in France over Platypus attack

French police arrested two suspects in the attack on the DeFi protocol Platypus, in which the project lost assets of more than $9 million.

[#Cybercriminalité]La #PoliceNationale met fin à une escroquerie d’ampleur pour un préjudice de 9,5 millions?sur une société américaine d’échange de cryptomonnaies.
Interpellation et convocation en justice de 2 individus
?saisie de 210 000 € en cryptomonnaies#PoliceJudiciaire pic.twitter.com/rKKuG95cWh

— Police nationale (@PoliceNationale) February 24, 2023

Law enforcement confiscated €210 000 in cryptocurrencies from the detainees.

For the unauthorized withdrawal from Platypus on November 17, unknown individuals exploited an “instant loan” and a vulnerability in the collateral contract’s solvency check. According to the DeFi platform’s statement, losses amounted to about 35% of users’ funds in the main pool.

As a result of the attack, the Platypus USD (USP) stablecoin lost its peg to the US dollar. At the time of writing, the “stablecoin” trades at around $0.32 (CoinGecko).

Following the incident, the platform’s team reached out to several crypto firms for help freezing and recovering the stolen funds.

On February 23, protocol developers presented a plan to restore users’ assets. They also said that, with joint efforts, they managed to recover 2.4 million USDC and block 1.5 million USDT. Regarding the crypto moved to Aave during the attack (~$377,000 in various stablecoins), the matter has been put to a vote by the lending protocol’s community.

Since the attack, we’ve been working with security experts & stakeholders to recover lost funds, trace the hacker, and explore potential solutions to retrieve trapped funds.
Here’s an update on the progress made thus far ?
Check our medium for more info?https://t.co/VoNYl9MAtd

— Platypus ? (?+?+?) (@Platypusdefi) February 23, 2023

Platypus noted that identifying those involved in the attack was aided by specialists from the Binance crypto exchange and renowned on-chain sleuth ZachXBT.

Update: @PoliceNationale have arrested and summoned 2 suspects who were reportedly exploiting our platform.
Thanks to the assistance of @binance and @zachxbt in tracing their identities.
Kudos to the prompt action by the authorities!

— Platypus ? (?+?+?) (@Platypusdefi) February 25, 2023

According to DeFi Llama, TVL of the platform stands at $39.2 million. Before the attack, the figure peaked at $54.6 million. Those figures are far from the March 2022 peak of $1.23 billion.

In 2022, Web3-industry lost about $3.6 billion in hacks.