NoxKitto

Binance, which is worth $6.3 billion, has been the victim of the worst hack in history. Binance said that the funds stolen from SAFU will be recovered and the good news is that transactions will be restored within 48 hours. How did this hack happen? The hackers targeted a DevOps engineer at Binance and sent him a job offer on LinkedIn. Then they asked him to upload a file for an interview. As soon as he did this, malware entered his official laptop and gave the hacker full access. Surprisingly, the hackers did not steal any passwords or private keys. They entered the service container stored inside Binance. This is a system that automatically approves customer withdrawal requests from Binance. The hackers then entered their command code and got the false withdrawal approved. Then they sent 50 withdrawal requests. Binance did not understand at first. As a result, $6.3 billion in Binance hot wallets were stolen using 10 different networks within 20 minutes. While this process was ongoing, on-chain tracker analysts saw billion-dollar transactions being made without any prior announcement (unusual large transactions require prior verification from Binance), and they sent an alert. And the security team followed the “Big Red Button” process and suspended all transactions. Then, since a large portion was being moved to USDT and USDC, at the request of Binance, both companies locked $1.6 billion in Tether and $800 million in Circle-USDC on-chain. As a result, $3.3 billion was jammed. The hackers could not take this money. In addition, some dollars were also blocked through the Ripple and Arbitrum chains. At the moment, the FBI and FOJ have come together for this incident and the hacker’s wallets have been sent to all exchangers around the world as blacklisted. As a result, the money will be frozen as soon as it goes to those exchanges. Powerful blockchain forensic teams like Chainalysis and TRM Labs are tracking the transactions. As far as I know, how can hackers withdraw this money? They will send money to Tornado Cash or similar mixer services. This technology will mix the hacker's money with millions of other people's crypto and make the track weak. They can also buy XMR tokens with dollars. Tracking this token is quite difficult and difficult. They can also send it to small exchanges that do not require KYC. They will send it in the form of dollars or bitcoins and transfer it to gold by paying a certain commission. Exchanges have previously been seen to negotiate with hackers. They ask for 80-90% of the funds to be returned and 10-20% as a bounty reward in a legitimate way and eliminate their own system vulnerabilities. A big problem with blockchain is that after a transaction, a digital footprint remains. If someone thinks they can get away with committing a crime with crypto, they will have to pay the fine. Data comes out of these footprints even after 5-10 years. Hackers have been able to remove 3 billion. They will not remove this money right away. That is why they often wait for 5-7 years. But if the client is as powerful as Binance, then the chances of being caught are much higher. Whenever they want to remove money, tracking companies will silently follow it and catch it in time. In the past, most of the hackers have been caught in major blockchain hacking incidents. Another thing I think is, if there is any link to the North Korean government, not a single penny of the 3 billion dollars will be recovered and even if the hackers are identified, North Korea will not hand them over. Because Binance is not authorized there. This incident will reduce user confidence. It will reduce the popularity of BNB coin in the market. So the authority will want to resolve this quickly, otherwise Binance will gradually fall behind in the race.