Hackers stole approximately $570 million in tokens from Binance, a world-leading crypto exchange, in a rare blow to the company and a blow to the troublesome cryptocurrency industry, which is desperately trying to recover its credibility after a recent price decline.
Binance has initially stated that about $100 million to $110 million worth of coins have been stolen, causing the blockchain to cease operations for about eight hours.
Binance has cleared up the earlier confusion by declaring that the BNB Chain bridge (previously known as Binance Smart Chain) has been hacked and that hackers managed to steal about two million Binance Coins (BNB), which are the native digital assets of the Binance exchange and which has a value at the time of writing this press article of approximately $284 million.
Blockchain bridges are used to allow crypto transactions to occur between various applications. It has become more and more common for criminals to target these tools, with over $2 billion stolen in 13 distinct hacking attacks in the first half of this year.
Binance said in a blog post that BNB Chain stopped the incident from getting worst by opening a communication channel with the blockchain’s validators, people who verify blockchain transactions. There were 44 validators working in several time zones, it added, without going into further details.
Binance has confirmed that the incident was restricted to BNB Chain, and that $100 million of the hacked funds have been stolen and at this time unable to recover them. However the rest of the funds have been immediately frozen in the hackers wallets.
Binance reiterated that funds are SAFU, a term used by the exchange that is the acronym for “Secure Asset Fund for Users”.
CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) tweeted post the incident:
“The issue is contained now. Your funds are safe. We apologise for the inconvenience and will provide further updates accordingly,”.
BNB price has been affected by the hack, with a drop in the coin of around 5% in the last 24 hours.