Cysic Exploit: $744K Sent to Tornado Cash After 10% Bounty Offer

The wallet linked to the Cysic bridge exploit transferred 300 ETH and 30.4 BNB—worth approximately $744,000—to Tornado Cash, according to blockchain security firm PeckShield. The move came after the Cysic Foundation offered the attacker a 10% bounty in exchange for returning stolen assets.

The attacker exploited a vulnerability in Cysic’s bridge to mint 10 million CYS tokens on BNB Smart Chain. Cysic subsequently suspended the bridge and blacklisted the recipient address, freezing about 2.8 million of the fraudulently minted tokens. The foundation said its mainnet and existing user-wallet assets were unaffected.

Under the bounty proposal, the attacker would need to return 275.872 ETH, valued at roughly $665,000, to recover about 90% of the identified Ether proceeds. Tornado Cash pools funds from multiple addresses, potentially making the stolen crypto harder to trace. The attacker’s Ethereum wallet held only about $45 in ETH at the time of publication, according to Akham data.

Cointelegraph said it contacted the Cysic Foundation for comment on recovery efforts but had not received a response before publication.