Polymarket Outage Traced to Compromised Website Performance Provider

Cryptocurrency-based prediction market Polymarket has confirmed that outages on Thursday were caused by a cybersecurity incident involving a third-party provider. The disruption began at 2pm EST. The company said it has referred the matter to law enforcement, temporarily halted trading, and has since brought the platform fully back online. It also said it will fully reimburse all affected traders.

Polymarket did not say how much was stolen or who was responsible. Several blockchain security companies traced the losses to an account that allegedly took more than $2.1 million in cryptocurrency from users. Cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock named the provider as DebugBear, which offers website performance services. DebugBear said it was impacted by an ongoing security incident and urged customers to remove its embed codes from their websites. Polymarket removed the DebugBear code from its site on Thursday.

Hudson Rock said it found evidence of what it called "wallet-draining code", designed to discover accounts, select assets and transfer funds to a designated account. It could not determine the number of victims or total losses. It also stressed that the evidence does not identify an attacker or show a wider compromise affecting other DebugBear customers. This summary covers only the opening of the original report.