A repentant hacker. Every week, new hacks occur in the decentralized finance. Fortunately, in some cases, hackers choose to return funds in exchange for a reward. Recently, the Euler Finance hacker made headlines by publicly revealing his identity.
Euler Finance hack: a look back at the facts
On March 13, the Euler Financewas the target of an attack. In all, nearly 200 million dollars were stolen by the hacker.
In practice, the hacker took advantage of a flaw in a smart contract in the rounding of a value to carry out his attack.
A few days after the attack, the Euler Finance teams set about negotiating with the hacker. In the end, they reached an agreement in which the attacker returned 90% of the funds. The remaining 10% was kept by the attacker as a reward for the discovery of a critical bug in the protocol.
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Euler Finance hacker reveals his identity
The case was closed several months ago, the Euler Finance hacker is back in the spotlight.
On June 30, the Euler Finance hacker gave an interview to our colleagues at Coinage.
We discovered a young Argentinian named Federico Jaime. This young entrepreneur learned to code at the age of 12, inspired by his engineer father. By the age of 14, this little computer genius was selling his first program for the modest sum of $10,000.
Later, he discovered the cryptocurrency ecosystem and decided to train in smart contract programming.
He soon turned his attention to smart contract security and bug-finding. Finally, after a month of analyzing smart contracts, he still hadn’t found a single bug.
Until the night of March 13thwhere he set about analyzing the Euler Finance protocol contracts. It was there that he discovered a potential loophole and set about exploiting it, successfully.
« First of all, I thought: this is really exciting. I’ve hacked a huge protocol. Then I thought, Wow, $200 million. It’s a curse on my back. »
In the interview, Federico said he never intended to keep the piracy money. He said he wanted to encourage ethical piracy and hoped Euler’s negotiating tactics would set a precedent for the rest of DeFi to follow.
« I knew from the beginning that $200 million was no small thing. It would do great damage to the DeFi community, and that was not my goal at all. »
Behind the scenes of Ronin’s transfer to the hacker
Following this hack, the Euler Finance hacker carried out a transfer of 100 ETH to the Ronin Bridge hacker’s wallet. As a reminder, the Ronin Bridge was exploited and $600 million was stolen. The attack was subsequently attributed to the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group.
During the interview, our Coinage colleague asked Federico Jaime about this. The latter stated that he had made the transfer to show his admiration for the Ronin hacker.
« The reason I sent 100 ETH to the Ronin exploiter was pure admiration… I thought that, from white-hat to black-hat, I wanted to show my admiration ».
Finally, this story came to an end on April 4, with 90% of the funds being returned to Euler Finance.. For its part, the protocol has been reimbursing aggrieved users since mid-April.
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