Blockchain bounty hunting continues to be incredibly valuable. Polygon Technology revealed Wednesday that they have released an update as a result of their recent bug bounty program which could potentially lead to over $24 billion worth of MATIC tokens being stolen!
The security researcher who informed Polygon of the vulnerability in their system received $2.2 million worth of stablecoins, while another bounty hunter got 1/3rd as much due to being less risky and successful on his or her own exploit attempts.
"We're lucky to have such an amazing team of partners who are always there for us," said Polygon. "At the end of our work together, Immunefi brought us one step closer toward becoming battle-tested solutions on top Ethereum."
Polygon's patched code came under fire recently when it was revealed that the company had failed to release information about this flaw until two days after their patch. The silent patches policy seems reasonable enough, but some people believe they should be more transparent with customers and provide updates on vulnerabilities immediately so there's no chance for exploiters who might want access before anyone else does.
The organization's official reply to their public is a reorganization of their critical response processes, consolidating partner contact info and communications channels. The CEO says they will formalize backups for key internal resources in order to eliminate single points of failures during time sensitive situations!
"We're not just talking about hackers here," said Immunefi. "In the grand scheme of things, and looking ahead at future development in DeFi (Defensive Finance), this won't be their last case where a severe vulnerability is found."
As more funds continually flow into DeFi at record rates, for example, through projects like MakerDAO's $150 million sale earlier this year; it becomes inevitable that there will also still exist critical exploits buried within these systems even though they are doing everything possible to protect itself from outside threats.
Bug bounty programs are a way for hackers to make money while looking through your code and finding vulnerabilities. However, the rewards can be lower than what they would normally receive because these bounties often have limits on how much cash is offered - in some cases as low as $2 million dollars! Polygon paid out nearly 4x this amount when their bug bounty reached 3 million dollars.
Polygon is pushing the limits of its bug bounty program yet again. This time, they paid another security researcher $2 million for a vulnerability that could have been exploited to steal up to 850 million worth of cryptocurrency--so far!