Cysic Bridge Hacker Funnels $744K to Tornado Cash Following Recovery Incentive

After the bounty proposal, the attacker sent 300 Ether (ETH) and 30.4 Binance Coin (BNB) to the crypto mixing service, as reported by blockchain security firm PeckShield.

The attacker exploited a vulnerability in the Cysic bridge to mint 10 million Cysic (CYS) tokens on the BNB Smart Chain last Saturday. In response, Cysic suspended bridge operations and blacklisted the recipient address, freezing approximately 2.8 million of these newly created tokens. The foundation confirmed that the mainnet and existing user wallet assets remained unaffected.

On the following Thursday, the Cysic Foundation publicly announced an offer of a 10% reward for returning 275,872 ETH (worth about $665,000), which constitutes roughly 90% of the stolen Ether amount identified.

Tornado Cash pools deposits from various sources, complicating tracking efforts. Reports from Akham indicate that the attacker’s Ethereum wallet held only $45 worth of Ether at the time of this report.

Cointelegraph reached out to the Cysic Foundation for comment regarding the status of the fund recovery but had not received a reply by publication time.

The hacker’s use of a recovery bounty and subsequent fund movement to a mixer highlights ongoing challenges in tracing stolen cryptocurrencies and the reliance on incentives for partial restitution.