Binance Hacked; US$566 Million Crypto Heist
2 Million Crypto Stolen by Brave Hacker
Cryptocurrency worth $566 million was stolen by a hacker on the popular Binance Bridge.
At 6:19 PM EST, this morning, Binance acknowledged that its platform was hacked by a criminal hacker. The security breach affected the complete operation of the Binance Bridge, as all transactions were paused that involved the platform’s BNB Smart Chain.
Currently, there is an ongoing investigation into the hacking attack.
Meanwhile, the cryptocurrency trading platform’s CEO also released several tweets on Twitter about the recent security breach.
According to the CEO of Binance in his tweeted messages, the Binance Smart Chain was suspended after its security team was made aware of an exploit that transferred crypto from BNB to the hacker, who has been linked to the BSC Token Hub.
Further tweets from the company’s CEO Changpeng Zhao stated, “An exploit on a cross-chain bridge, BSC Token Hub, resulted in additional BNB.”
Additionally, Zhao revealed “All validators have been asked to temporarily halt BSC. The problem is now under control. Your money is secure. We are sorry for the inconvenience and will update you as necessary.”
The brazen hack fetched the hackers a whopping 2 million Binance Coins (BNB), with a US dollar value worth $566 million in hard currency. Since the hack happens only a few hours ago, there is just a small amount of details about the stolen crypto. Also, there is not much information about the hacker that infiltrated and breached the Binance Bridge.
Two Million Binance Coins Theft
With just a few details being released; it appears that the threat actor launched the attack around 2:30 PM EST today. The hack was realized when a crypto wallet, purportedly belonging to the hacker received two very large transactions in the amount of 1,000,000 BNB cryptocurrency each.
After the profitable payday, very soon after, the hacker linked to the latest cryptocurrency hack was observed distributing the stolen cryptographic funds, in an effort to convert them across several cryptocurrency liquidity pools.
The converted assets from the stolen BNB coins, according to Binance, calculates to $70, or $80 million that was removed from the platform’s blockchain. And while that amount of cash is currently taken off-chain, the majority of the stolen cryptocurrency was quickly locked on the BNB Smart Chain, thus allowing the cyber security team to block the crypto from being transferred out by the threat actor.
In addition, there was another seven million dollars worth of off-chain assets frozen through quick collaboration in the bitcoin community.
