peshkov
The cryptocurrency ecosystem has suffered another major hack after Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, briefly halted its blockchain network on Friday after an attacker stole 2M of its BNB tokens – about $566M at current prices.
BNB tokens fell 3.6% to $2813.45 at 9:20 a.m. ET.
“An exploit on a cross-chain bridge, BSC Token Hub, resulted in extra BNB. We have asked all validators to temporarily suspend BSC,” Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said Thursday evening.
Cross-chain bridges enables cryptos to move from one blockchain to another. This has been a popular tool among cybercriminals because it makes illicit crypto activities (think of money laundering) harder to track.
The “potential exploit” has since been contained and operations have been resumed. “The issue is contained now. Your funds are safe,” CZ said.
In an earlier estimate, Binance said the total amount withdrawn ranged from $100M-110M, which was equivalent to a quarter of the last BNB burn. Last year, the company launched a BNB auto-burn protocol to replace the quarterly burn.
To sum up what happened, “there was a bug in the way that the Binance Bridge verified proofs which could have allowed attackers to forge arbitrary messages. Fortunately, the attacker here only forged two messages, but the damage could have been far worse,” @samczsun, a research partner at Paradigm, wrote in a Twitter post.
The news comes as the crypto world has come under a long string of attacks in recent months. For instance, thousands of Solana crypto wallets were recently compromised.
Previously, (Aug. 2) crypto startup Nomad drained of almost $200M in bridge hack.
