All Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that were stolen from the peer-to-peer trading platform NFT Trader have been returned following the payment of a bounty.
The hack, which occurred on December 16, resulted in the theft of NFTs valued at nearly $3 million. The attacker, through public messages, attributed the original exploit to another user and demanded ransom payments for the return of the NFTs, stating, "if you want the monkey nft back, then you need to pay me a bounty, which is what I deserve. 1 BAYC = 30 ETH 1 MAYC = 6 ETH you need to pay me %10 ETH for my work if you have a BAYC with me then you need to pay me 3 ETH if it's a BAYC and a MAYC then 3.6 ETH."
In a swift response, a community initiative led by Boring Security, a non-profit Web3 security project funded by ApeCoin, successfully recovered all the assets within 24 hours of paying the 120 Ether (ETH) bounty. At the time of writing, the bounty payment amounted to approximately $267,000.
The Boring Security team announced on X (formerly Twitter) that they now possess all 36 BAYC and 18 MAYC NFTs that were in the possession of the exploiter. As part of the recovery process, the team sent the hacker a bounty equivalent to 10% of the floor price of the collections.
The bounty payment was made by Greg Solano, co-founder of Yuga Labs, the company behind both NFT collections. Yuga Labs facilitated negotiations to recover the stolen tokens and returned them to their rightful owners free of charge.
Source : Yahoo crypto / Dec 18, 2023