Another Major Crypto Hack as $100M BNB Stolen

The crypto industry has witnessed another major hack.

Roughly $100 million of Binance Coin (BNB) was stolen after an exploit occurred on a bridge between blockchains.

The issue is "contained now," Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, the billionaire co-founder of Binance, said on Twitter.

The world’s biggest crypto exchange, Binance-backed blockchain BNB Chain, estimated that around $100 million to $110 million of digital tokens were involved in the incident.

A post published by Binance on Twitter reads:

"@BNBchain is currently under maintenance. We will suspend all deposits and withdrawals via BNB chain temporarily until there are further updates. We apologise for the inconvenience. Thank you for your patience!"

BNB also said on Twitter that " we request BSC Validators to get in touch with us within the next few hours so that we can plan a node upgrade."

A spokesman said that at least $7 million of stolen funds has already been frozen, and the bridge, BSC Token Hub, has been suspended.

In another recent case of a major hack, multi-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator platform Transit Swap announced via Twitter that it lost $21 million after a hacker exploited an internal bug on its swap contract.

Following the incident, Transit Swap issued an apology statement to the users, saying that efforts are underway to recover the stolen funds. "After a self-review by the TransitFinance team, it was confirmed that the incident was caused by a hacker attack due to a bug in the code. We are deeply sorry," the DeFi platform stated.

The DEX aggregator said it is working with cybersecurity specialists such as SlowMist, PeckShield, Bitrace, and TokenPocket security and technical teams to track down the hacker and recover the funds.

Transit Swap said a bug in the code allowed a hacker to run away with an estimated $21 million. PeckShield, a blockchain security company, gave a further explanation that the attack might have occurred due to a compatibility issue or misplaced trust in the swap contract.

According to Chainalysis, the total revenue for crypto crime in the first half of this year stood at $1.6 billion, less than the figure recorded in the first half of 2021. The drop in crypto crime figures has coincided with a fall in crypto values. However, some forms of crypto-crime have risen in the last year, such as the value of hacked crypto assets has increased from $1.2 billion to $1.9 billion.

While Bloomberg reported that about $2 billion has been lost in crypto hacks this year. Many of those hacks were perpetrated by North Korea-linked groups, and cross-chain bridges used to transfer tokens across blockchains have been a popular target.

The Binance hack has shown that even though the Binance ecosystem is among the highest profile, it can still be buffeted. 

Zhao said on Twitter that "in all likelihood, Binance will cover any fund that the hackers get away with."

BNB fell as much as 3.3% on Friday and was trading around $285 as of 10:08 am in Tokyo.