79thVault claws back 92% of stolen BNB as Bitget doubts $388M return

79thVault has recovered 15,000 BNB from the hacker who looted its 79AU liquidity pool on October 7.

The hacker returned roughly 92% of the 16,249 BNB that went missing. Stolen crypto is almost never recovered, making the return a rare win.

How much did the 79Vault hacker return?

The 79thVault team confirmed on X that the hacker who looted its 79AU liquidity pool and made off with over 16,000 BNB returned 92% of it (15,000 BNB), linking an on-chain transaction for the recovered coins. 79thVault plans to put the BNB back into its liquidity pool and permanently burn the LP tokens that result.

The attack began on October 7 when an operator wallet pulled 2.01 million 79AU tokens out of the project’s PancakeSwap pool.

The perpetrator made seven transactions between 07:25 and 08:25 UTC to fully extract the funds and then sold them for BNB through roughly 95 trades.

The pool’s USDT reserves dropped from about $15.2 million to $3.9 million. The sale of the 2.01 million tokens generated about 16,249 BNB, worth around $12.5 million.

79thVault blamed the hack on “weaknesses in account permission management,” in its October 8 statement. However, reports state that the 79AU contract held an OPERATOR_ROLE function capable of moving tokens from the pool and rewriting its reserves and that permission was later revoked.

How much can Bitget get back from its hack?

Two incidents similar to the 79thVault refund have occurred in two weeks, showing that when the attacker can be identified and pressured, exchanges can recover their money.

Cryptopolitan reported that the NEAR Intents attacker sent back the entire $3.8 million stolen about a day after general manager Alex Shevchenko posted the attacker’s wallet addresses and a 48-hour ultimatum.

“We have identified you, sir,” Shevchenko wrote.

However, it is much more complicated to recover money from heists tied to state-linked actors. Bitget’s CEO Gracy Chen has stated that she is “not very optimistic” about recovering the $388 million stolen from her exchange last month.

She referred to the February 2025 Bybit hack, where only about 3.5% of roughly $1.5 billion was ever frozen. Chen said North Korea may be behind the Bitget breach.

Cryptopolitan reported that Drift Protocol’s $285 million exploit was also linked to North Korean actors. More than six months later, and a majority of the funds are still lost. Notably, much of it was laundered through Tornado Cash.

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