Binance Blockchain Hit by $570 Million Hack The New York Times

KuCoin is a popular digital asset exchange and in September 2020 they were hacked for $285 million. After paying off the flash loan and other fees, the hacker had a profit of $76 million. Four months later, Beanstalk relaunched its project after raising funds from private investors and auditing its code.

“Exchanges should take all measures to secure these funds to be returned to the bankruptcy estate,” FTX said in another tweet. It is yet unclear how much the assets that Bahamian regulators took into custody are worth. CNBC reported on an emergency court filing by FTX on Nov. 18 to stop further action by the Bahamas regulators. FTX filings alleged that Bankman-Fried was possibly working in concert with those regulators.

Last year was bad, but 2022 was much worse, “the biggest year ever for hacking.” An armed guard patrols in front of illuminated mining rigs mounted in racks at a cryptocurrency mining farm in Bratsk, Russia, on Nov. 8, 2019. BNB Chain, originally known as Binance Chain, was first developed by Binance in 2019.

$570 million worth of Binance’s BNB token stolen in another major crypto hack

The exchange ignored several red flags for fraud during the theft, he said, such as the use of a new device and password reset, and that it didn’t use the facial recognition he had put in place. Scammers using SIM swap fraud take advantage of 2-factor authentication , where banks and other service providers send a text message to their customer’s phone to confirm activity on an account. They get a carrier to activate a SIM card on a new device for the customer’s number, which lets them go through all the checks successfully. But the exchange has said it won’t reimburse Ferguson and said in an email that customers are responsible for any activity that occurs when devices or passwords are compromised, according to the suit. In his lawsuit filed Monday, New York resident Jared Ferguson said 90% of his life savings were wiped out on the platform in a security breach via his phone. A Coinbase user is suing the exchange to recover 90% of his life savings that he says was stolen from him, lawsuit claims.

The popular cryptocurrency bridge had to plug the hole in the project’s finances after the funds were not recovered. This was also the largest theft that included Solana, one of the rivals to Ethereum’s dominance in the worlds of DeFi and NFTs. Hackers have long devastated the crypto industry, stealing billions of dollars annually from exchanges, custodial services and wallet software users who keep their assets on “hot wallets” connected to the internet. The Crypto.com hack is the latest in a string of attacks targeting cryptocurrency exchanges, which are some of the most high-value targets in the steadily growing cryptocurrency ecosystem.

• Announced finding a wallet holding a balance of approximately 200,000 BTC.
• “South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb has had around $13 million in the EOS cryptocurrency stolen in a hack it suspects was an insider job.
• In March, hackers stole around $615 million from a blockchain bridge called Ronin Bridge, in one of the largest crypto heists on record, ter linked by the United States to North Korean hackers.
• The hacker exploited a reentrancy vulnerability in the lending protocol.
• This was not in line with the best industry practice as the majority of funds should be kept in isolated storage.

Serum is a “decentralized exchange,” with a Serum token running natively on Solana, promising users faster settlement and execution times. FTX and Alameda were large backers of the project, which was forked in an attempt to prevent FTX control following the bankruptcy. The funds were laundered quickly—as they typically are in hacks—with around $7 million in Ethereum sent to cryptocurrency mixing service Tornado Cash (now banned by U.S. government). This is because BSC chain validators froze the network following the attack—but hackers did manage to move around $100 million in funds to other chains. A total of around $1.4 billion has been lost to breaches on cross-chain bridges since the start of 2022, according to data from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. In total, hackers drained 2 million BNB tokens — about $570 million at current prices — from the network, Binance’s BNB Chain said in ablog poston Friday.

Twitter sleuth ZachXBT tweeted Friday night that “multiple former FTX employees confirmed to me that they do not recognize these transfers.” The breach resulted in the loss of roughly 8 million vericoins , or about 30% of the total coins in existence, a member of the vericoin development team told CoinDesk.” Meanwhile, tweets from Whale Alert indicated that 19,391 tokens worth nearly $2.44 million and around 48 million centrality tokens worth about $1.18 million were transferred from Cryptopia to unknown wallets on Jan. 13.” “The official statement of the exchange disclosed that 450,000 email addresses and passwords were leaked in a massive global hacking attack involving 24 websites and some 747 million records.” FTX owes its largest creditors some $3.1 billion, according to court filings.

Analyzing Custodial vs. Self-Custodial Wallets

According to reports, the hackers attempted to gain access to the exchange’s hot wallets that store a small portion of customers’ funds but were denied access by internal systems. While unsuccessful in stealing funds, the hackers were able to compromise an internal database that included user’s information such as phone numbers, email addresses and portfolio information on assets. The Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid is the latest victim in a major cyber hack that has resulted in the loss of approximately $97 million according to reports. Liquid has upgraded its security infrastructure to new secure vaults in order to resume trading services.

These 51% coin exchange hackeds are only practical on smaller blockchains because of the lower cost of taking over the network. Since Bitcoin’s network is so large, it would require billions of dollars in hardware and electricity to maintain a sustained 51% attack. Remember, a crypto hacker would need to take control of more than half a blockchain to corrupt the transaction history. Cryptocurrency options and futures exchange Deribit has been hacked, with $28 million being drained from its hot wallet. The transfers occurred on the same day that the firm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. after apparently losing – or misappropriating – billions of dollars in user funds. Suspicions – which are conjecture at this point – circulated online about whether, rather than an outside attack, someone inside the company might’ve been responsible.

• BNB Chain, described by Binance as a “community-driven, open-sourced and decentralized ecosystem,” said it would introduce a new “governance mechanism” to counter future hacks, as well as expand the number of validators.
• The Lotte World Tower in Seoul cost this much, but hackers could have built several towers like this one with the wealth they looted.
• However, as we all know, some cryptos have skyrocketed in value in recent years.
• Hackers breached the Ronin Network and made off with around $625 million worth of Ethereum and the USDC stablecoin.

“A relativley small South Korean cryptocurrency exchange, Youbit, was reportedly hacked earlier today, and is filing for bankruptcy after losing 17% of users’ funds.” “Bancor, a crypto company that touts a decentralized exchange service, has lost some $23.5 million of cryptocurrency tokens belonging to its users following a hack.” “A cryptocurrency exchange with about 2 million users worldwide announced that it has “suffered a serious cyber attack.” A number of basic services are paralyzed and the attacker tried to access the exchange’s wallets.” In one bizarre, public case, a hacker stole $600 million from the cryptocurrency platform Poly Network. Instead of blaming the thief, the company decided to appeal to his better nature, calling him “Mr. White Hat,” which is a cybersecurity term for a researcher working to help make things more secure.

Other incidents

Cryptocurrency is still breaking its way into mainstream society and remains highly unregulated. There are little insurances to safeguard incidents and many victims have to rely on the good faith of the crypto company to reimburse them. Preceding the attack, withdrawal limits had suddenly been reduced and non-European users were banned. This led to assumptions that BitGrail had detected suspicious activity before the hack took place.

Like other blockchains, it features a native token, called BNB, that can be traded or used in games and other applications. “An exploit on a cross-chain bridge, BSC Token Hub, resulted in extra BNB. We have asked all validators to temporarily suspend BSC,” Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s CEO, said in a tweet Thursday evening. Danika Miller is a writer who specializes in personal finance, crypto, education, and technology.

The rest of it is in “hot wallets,” that are liquid and can be sent to users. The popular trading platform Poloniex lost about 12.3% of its total Bitcoin holdings in an attack in 2014. A hacker had reportedly exploited a vulnerability in the exchange’s coding that allowed access to the private keys for the funds. Trading was halted as the hackers successfully transferred stolen funds of 76 Bitcoins from the exchange worth $50,000 at the time. Bitrue is a popular Singaporean crypto exchange that was hacked for over 4.5 million dollars worth of cryptocurrencies on 27 June, 2019.

The total amount does not include stolen user data and undisclosed amounts of stolen funds. One of the biggest heists happened this month, when the crypto trading platform Bitmart said hackers stole almost $200 million after they broke into a company account. 2020 was a tough year for many people, but a comparatively quiet year for crypto hacks. We’ve highlighted the three biggest digital heists, including an incident where hackers returned everything they stole. Mango Markets is a popular trading platform based on the Solana blockchain. In October, a user drained the platform to the tune of over $100 million by temporarily driving up the value of their tokens and taking a loan using the inflated tokens as collateral.

Binance did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment. Please also recognize that these markets span national borders and that significant trading may occur on systems and platforms outside the United States. Your invested funds may quickly travel overseas without your knowledge. As a result, risks can be amplified, including the risk that market regulators, such as the SEC, may not be able to effectively pursue bad actors or recover funds. Terpin also sued Nicholas Truglia and won a $75.8 million judgment against Truglia in 2019 in California state court. FTX and Alameda Research founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was indicted by the U.S.

The hack was caused by a bug in the bridge’s smart contract that allowed hackers to forge transactions and send money back to their crypto wallet, according to crypto security firm Immunefi. Hackers stole private keys to access hot wallets, but more details of the cyber attack were not disclosed. BitPoint paused all services and didn’t detect any vulnerabilities to its cold wallets.

He agreed to help break into the wallet, for his standard 20 percent fee—paid only if he is successful. Although most people don’t have thousands in forgotten cryptocurrency, everyone relies on passwords to manage their digital lives. And as more and more people buy crypto, how can they protect their assets? We talked to a host of experts to figure out how to create the best passwords for your digital accounts, and, if you have crypto, what your basic storage tradeoffs are. On July 15, 2020, Twitter accounts of prominent personalities and firms, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Apple, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg and Uber were hacked. Twitter confirmed that it was a coordinated social engineering attack on their own employees.

The Korean https://coinbreakingnews.info/currency currency exchange is a repeat offender on our list and has been involved in 3 separate hacking incidents within a 3 time period. The first Bithumb hack happened in July 2017 when hackers stole $7 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum, while the second incident took place in June 2018 that resulted in a loss of $31 million worth of Ripple . The Russian cryptocurrency provider Livecoin suffered a major security breach on December 23, 2020.

For example, hackers were able to take over 51% of the mining power of Ethereum Classic at least three times in 2020. The hackers were able to alter data on thousands of ETC blocks and make off with millions. So how can cryptocurrency be hacked, and what can people do to protect their digital assets?