Making Tech Headlines · Page 2
Polymarket's Forecast Meets a Third-Party Script
· New York time
Polymarket temporarily halted trading after attackers compromised a third-party service and distributed cryptocurrency-draining JavaScript. About $2.5 million in assets was traced to a suspected attacker wallet, and trading later resumed on the platform's flagship international service. The breached vendor was based in the United Kingdom, rather than being Polymarket's own website. The company said UK law enforcement had been notified. Some traders lost money from their wallets, and blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps said around 700 users appeared to be affected. The distinction between a platform and a supplier matters to the investigation, although a trader watching money leave a wallet may not find the distinction especially comforting. A service can depend on code from elsewhere while still presenting users with one familiar screen. That makes the supply chain part of the customer experience, even when nobody put it in the marketing material. The market reopened after several hours of investigation, restoring the place where users can trade on uncertain events. It is an awkward interruption for a business built around pricing the future: the immediate risk arrived through a piece of software that traders were not there to evaluate. A probability chart is less helpful when the question is who got into the vendor's code.
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