Binance forced to briefly halt transactions following $100 million blockchain hack

Binance briefly suspended fund transfers and different transactions on Thursday evening after it found an exploit on its Good Chain (BSC) blockchain community. Early experiences mentioned hackers stole cryptocurrency equal to greater than $500 million, however Binance chief govt Changpeng Zhao said that the corporate estimates the breach’s influence to be between $100 million and $110 million. A complete of $7M had already been frozen.

The cryptocurrency trade additionally assured customers on Reddit that their funds are protected. As Zhao defined, an exploit on the BSC Token Hub cross-chain bridge, which permits the switch of cryptocurrency and digital property like NFTs from one blockchain to a different, “resulted in additional BNB” or Binance Coin. That would imply the dangerous actors minted new BNBs after which moved an equal of round $100 million off the blockchain as a substitute of stealing folks’s precise funds. In line with Bleeping Laptop, the hacker rapidly unfold the stolen cryptocurrency in makes an attempt of changing it to different property, nevertheless it’s unclear if they’d succeeded. 

Zhao mentioned the problem has been contained. The Good Chain community has additionally started running again — with fixes to cease hackers from getting in — so customers may be capable to resume their transactions quickly. Cross-chain bridge hacks have grow to be a prime safety threat lately, and this incident is however one in every of many. Blockchain analyst agency Chainalysis reported again in August that an estimated whole of $2 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen throughout 13 cross-chain bridge hacks. Roughly 69 p.c of that quantity had been stolen this yr alone.