Prediction market Polymarket paused all trading on Thursday due to a “security incident” that led to $2.65 million being swiped from users’ wallets within minutes.
Polymarket said in a statement the halt in trading affected its international platform and was the result of a third-party provider being “compromised.”
“We’ve identified & fixed an issue impacting our international platform, Polymarket.com,” the company said. “One of our 3rd party providers was compromised, and we have referred this to relevant law enforcement. Anyone who has been impacted will be made whole. Out of an abundance of caution, we have temporarily halted trading & are working to bring the platform back online.”
The Wall Street Journal reported the platform affected was Debugbear, a Polymarket vendor used to monitor performance on the trading platform.
Debugbear said in a statement that its software was “impacted by a security incident” related to its real user monitoring product.
The incident occurred around 2:30 p.m. and was resolved within the hour. However, multiple reports found that over $2.5 million was siphoned from Polymarket users’ wallets through more than 900 transactions.
“We’ll make this right and are fully reimbursing all affected traders,” Polymarket said.
The suspected attack affected Polymarket’s U.K. platform, but users in the United States were not affected. The company said the matter was referred to British authorities.
Thursday’s circumstances are not the first time the platform has experienced a suspected attack. In June, Polymarket users lost a combined $3.1 million due to a phishing attack. The hackers inserted code into software that runs parts of Polymarket’s frontend, thereby tricking users into agreeing to asset transfers to attackers.
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Polymarket is not the only platform that is susceptible to such attacks.
The creators of PHP, which powers as much as 70% of the world’s websites, said last week that its system is facing a critical security problem that hackers could use to take control of any website running its software. Security researchers found the vulnerability, called PHP2Shell, using artificial intelligence, but AI could also be used by hackers to easily exploit the bug.