On the 24th of October, Changpeng Zhao, the chief executive officer of Binance, told CNBC that Binance is narrowing down the identity of the attacker who stole $570 million worth of crypto from a cross-chain bridge on the 6th of October. According to the CEO, Zhao, they have frozen more than 90% of the stolen funds on the blockchain before they could be moved.
Now, the company that runs the world’s largest centralized crypto exchange, Binance, has had some help finding the responsible party. Zhao, who was speaking to CBNC from Dubai, said that they are still actually helping law enforcement to chase the bad players and working with law enforcement around the globe. Moreover, he said that in this particular instance, law enforcement gave them tips on who they think it may be, so they’re narrowing it down.
After the hack was first reported, Binance stopped its Smart Chain to stop moving funds. About funds safety, Zhao said in a Reddit post that funds were safe. About the stolen moved funds’ worth, Zhao said that the value of the funds taken off the BSC was between $100 and $110 million.
After some time from the exploit, Sam Sun, a Paradigm researcher, on a Twitter post, said that the attacker somehow convinced the Binance Bridge to send them 1 million BNB two times.
It was not the first hack on the Binance Smart Chain bridge because there were many BSC bridge hacks in the past. According to Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics firm, from the start of the year through August, attacks on cross-chain bridges accounted for $2 billion, or 69% of all funds stolen. This data from Chainalysis shows that the attackers how much targeted the BSC bridge to stole funds.
Chainalysis published a report in which the firm wrote that bridges are an attractive target because they often feature a central storage point of funds that back the bridged assets on the receiving blockchain. The firm believes that it does not matter how those funds are stored, as they could be locked up in a smart contract or with a centralized custodian. The firm believes that the storage point, where funds are locked, becomes the target.
