Crypto News - Binance Hack and Bitcoin Over $6000. Where will we go from here?
On 7th of May Binance has revealed that they have discovered a large scale security breach. Hackers were able to obtain a large number of user API keys, 2FA codes, and potentially other info.
Binance also mentioned that are still concluding all possible methods used. There may also be additional affected accounts that have not been identified yet however.
BTC hot wallet was affected which contained about 2% of Binance total BTC holdings. The hackers were able to withdraw 7000 BTC in one transaction.
The hackers waited and executed an attack through multiple seemingly independent accounts. The transaction is structured in a way that passed Binance existing security checks. Once executed, the withdrawal triggered various alarms in our system. We stopped all withdrawals immediately after that.
Binance will use the #SAFU fund to cover this incident in full. No user funds will be affected. SAFU, the Secure Asset Fund for Users is an emergency insurance fund.
The fund was introduced last year where Binance started allocating 10% of all trading fees received into SAFU to offer protection to the users and their funds in extreme cases. This fund is stored in a separate cold wallet."
Binance is also doing a security review that will include all parts of their systems and data. They estimate that this will take about one week with deposits and withdrawals remaining suspended during this period of time.
They will continue to enable trading, so users may adjust their trades if they want.
According to Binance it wasn't exchange hack but user hacks where individual users were being hacked through variety of techniques, including phishing, viruses and other attacks.
This means that it was users fault and not exchange fault however this has not been confirmed and is simply claims made by Binance.
On top of that Binance will cover the loses and they also admitted to the 'hack' so they get plenty of props for that.
Still frozen withdrawals and deposits just prove that unless you hold private keys the cryptocurrency stored in Binance isn't really yours.
CEO of Binance was considered 'rollback' of Bitcoin to erase the hacker transaction however it's something that wasn't really possible due to how BTC works.