Binance victim of massive hack

Binance is the victim of a major hack. Almost $600 million worth of BNB was allegedly stolen.

New day, new hack in the crypto world. And the least we can say is that it’s significant. A hacker managed to steal almost $600 million worth of BNB cryptocurrency, which is operated by the popular exchange Binance. The hack happened a few days ago. The investigation was led by several cybersecurity experts, including @samczsun and Igor Igamberdiev.

Binance victim of massive hack

According to @samczsun, the hacker got his way by tricking BSC Token Hub, a crypto bridge, into sending just over 2 million BNB, or about $586 million at the time of this writing.

BSC or Binance Smart Chain is a crypto platform for running decentralized applications similar to Ethereum. BNB or Binance Coin is Binance’s cryptocurrency, just like Ethereum. A bridge is a project that allows you to transfer funds from one crypto platform to another.

According to samczsun’s analysis, the attacker exploited a bug in the BSC Token Hub to randomly forge, allowing him to mint BNB tokens from scratch.

Nearly $600 million worth of BNB allegedly stolen

Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ”Zhao confirmed the hack very quickly. “A flaw in the cross-chain bridge, the BSC Token Hub, allowed these extra BNBs to be used. We have asked all validators to temporarily suspend BSC. Now the problem is solved. Your funds are safe. We apologize for the inconvenience and will get back to you very soon about this,” he tweeted.

Although samcszun claims that the amount stolen is much larger (a fact confirmed by the transactions listed on the chain), CZ claims that the “current damage estimate”is around $100 million. In an official post on Reddit, Binance explained that “the current estimate of the stolen BSC funds is between $100 million and $110 million”and roughly $7 million has already been stolen (meaning the hacker can’t help but move forward). This discrepancy in numbers is most likely due to the fact that Binance refers to the funds that the hacker was able to transfer to other networks or make inaccessible by other methods.

This is not the first major Binance hack. In 2019, Binance was hacked in the amount of about $40 million, while the hacker stole about 7,000 bitcoins from the exchange. The funds were never returned, but the company covered the losses of customers.

The value of BNB dropped by about 3.5% after this hack and is currently around $285, according to Coingecko.

Five hours ago, an attacker stole 2 million BNB (~$566 million) from Binance Bridge. During this time, I have worked closely with several parties to sort out and resolve this issue. Here’s how it went. pic.twitter.com/E0885Dc3lW

— samczsun (@samczsun) October 6, 2022