Binance Hacked — Hackers Stole Over $40 Million Worth Of Bitcoin

In a statement, Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao said the company
discovered a “large scale security breach” earlier on May 7, as a
result of which hackers were able to steal roughly 7000 bitcoins,
which worth 40.6 million at the time of writing.

News of the hack comes just hours after Zhao tweeted that
Binance has “to perform some unscheduled server maintenance that
will impact deposits and withdrawals for a couple of
hours.”

According to the company, malicious attackers used a variety of
attack techniques, including phishing and computer viruses, to
carry out the intrusion and were able to breach a single BTC hot
wallet (a cryptocurrency wallet that’s connected to the Internet),
which contained about 2% of the company’s total BTC holdings, and
withdraw stolen Bitcoins in a single
transaction^[1].

What’s more disturbing is that the company admitted the hackers
managed to get their hands on user critical information, such as
API keys, two-factor authentication codes, and potentially other
information, which is required to log in to a Binance account.

Zao also warned that “hackers may still control certain user
accounts and may use those to influence prices.”

Fortunately, the Binance cold storage—the offline wallets where
the majority of funds are kept—remain secure. Also,
Internet-connected individual user wallets were not directly
affected.

Binance CEO said the company last year set up an internal
insurance mechanism, called Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU),
which will cover the entire amount of the hack and won’t impact
users.