Polymarket resumes trading after security breach, pledges refunds to traders
What's the story
Polymarket, a prediction market platform, has reported an outage on its international platform. The disruption was caused by a hack of an unnamed third-party data provider. Traders first flagged the issue on social media platforms, reporting unauthorized withdrawals from their accounts on Thursday afternoon. In response to the incident, Polymarket halted trading on its international platform.
Resolution measures
Incident referred to UK law enforcement
Polymarket has announced that it has fixed the issue on its end and trading has now resumed.
The company also assured full reimbursement for any wallets affected by this hack.
A spokesperson from Polymarket said they have referred the incident to UK law enforcement as that is where the third-party provider operates.
Platform details
Incident comes ahead of US midterm elections
Polymarket's international prediction market exchange is a decentralized finance platform that runs on the Polygon blockchain. It isn't regulated in the US.
However, the company's domestic exchange continued to operate normally during the outage.
The disruption comes just days ahead of the US midterm elections on November 3, which are expected to drive high trading volumes on both Polymarket's international and US exchanges.
Incident source
Hack linked to DebugBear
The incident has been linked to DebugBear, a UK-based company that provides website performance monitoring tools.
DebugBear's own website was down on Thursday afternoon and the company posted on X that it was "impacted by an ongoing security incident."
It also advised clients using one of its products to remove the embed code from their websites.