alt Hacker NewsBinance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
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Looks like a DevOps guy is going to take the blame for this: "Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions." https://x.com/binance/status/2115993361517891592
Some of the old Mt Gox threads are an interesting read today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203051
Molly White (she runs web3isgoinggreat) seems to think this is real [0]
If your bitcoin is on someone else's computer its not your bitcoin.
For context, that’s about 10 months of fees for Binance, depending on how much of the volume they trade are discounted and considering current average volumes.
If hacking one devops engineer's laptop is enough to move $6B of assets out of Binance, Binance is staggeringly incompetent and their customers need to move their funds out right now.
This is a really insane hack in comparison to the other ones we've seen. Genuinely Binance was so big that this is a real big wtf moment for crypto. If they can get hacked then what about all the other exchanges?!
Interestingly, this 18,270 BTC Binance theft is only "the largest crypto theft on record" when measured in USD. In terms of pure BTC, it's not even close to the 2011-14 Mt. Gox loss of ~850,000 BTC!
Coffeezilla (on 2nd channel voidzilla) had an interesting take on it: "I haven't seen a lot of people talking about the fact that centralized assets were kind of the hero in this story ironically... that's actually the reason why losses weren't so bad in this case". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HaySrzDyWU
Is crypto like USDT really decentralized if they can freeze assets... I guess it's in some middle ground between banks and true decentralization?
This is the beginning of a flight to perceived quality in all things digital and monetary. Fear of losing your money is among the most potent basal human instincts.
The hack is publicized for at least a hour, but from reporting I saw they still continue to drain funds as for now. I wonder why large CEX do not have any safety measures for this kind of hacks, they could withdraw everything to newly generated wallets and minimize damage that way. It is certainly not the first time CEX wallets get hacked.
So, what's the most likely outcome here? Maybe Circle/Tether/etc freeze some or most of it, but say the hacker gets a billion dollars. Are they able to launder it thoroughly enough that they can eventually turn it into fiat and live like a king?
North Korean nuclear weapons engineers thank crypto fans for their ongoing contributions.
CZ saying it is confirmed, and that he expects accountholders to be made fully whole... I guess you can do that when 2.8BN is frozen by centralized stablecoins.
Polymarket also reported a security incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295883
Yeah... these days, the best way to keep your money safe is to store it in a sack in the basement.
I find it odd that people put "decentralized" currency into a centralized wallet
The hack seems to be via engineers laptop.
This attack vector has become so common and funny.
In one scenario, i remember a company got hacked because an engineer downloaded a RAT package on company laptop during fake interview and asked him to keep it running for days as part of the interview process while they stole the data.
wait, someone took the stealmybitcoin.com poc code to the next level!
How in the freakin world could $6B disappear into a regulated banking system without leaving a trail?
I guess at some point they'll have to cash out. Seems hard to spend $6B in vape shops.
It would be hilarious if this was caused by man-in-the-middle or BGP/DNS compromise because of eMudhra.
Binance wallet 16 came online in 2021.
Why to wait 5 years to attack.
Confused how this can’t just be tracked. Pretty hard to hide billions in bitcoin when most off-ramps need KYK?
What am I missing ?
I’ve been waiting for this. Given llm aptitude for offensive security hacks it was just a matter of time. I wager most alt coins are compromised at this point.
Binance is tweeting they think it's a compromised devops laptop. How fucking bonkers insane is it that they would have such fragile systems that any single employees machine would possibly have access to trigger Billions in transactions. Even access to low millions or hundreds of thousands I would expect to be heavily heavily restricted and involve coordinating several people as security measures.
I think it's been clear for a while now that if you intend to hold crypto, you should probably do it at the biggest, most boring, most regulated institution you can find.
Same goes with startup banks - if you exceed FDIC limits, make sure the difference is in a large institutional bank. Nearly learned this one the hard way.
Trying to save a few basis points in txn fees in very volatile industries comes at a huge risk premium
This one is even bigger than 2025's ByBit breach, which was $1.5B
Isn't this as it should be? I remember years ago I read about the "Bitcoin manifesto" or whatever. That a transaction "done is done, no matter the reason" its all part of the ideology of these kinds of things. Anyone know what quote Im thinking of?
It's lucky for everyone that this happened to binance, other exchanges would have likely caused a lot of issues for people holding money in said exchanges.
But it's also surprising that it happened to binance at all. This checks a lot of the boxes for being, at least indirectly, an inside job.
From Binance customers, not from Binance.
IMO, we'll need to rebuild all of crypto and all software from scratch using a minimalist approach. Minimize the amount of code, with proper modularization where each module has clear responsibilities and fully self-contained attack surface and exposes a well-defined set of features.
Looks like they're still actively swapping out of USDT.. so much for freezing those.
Can we close the crypto experiment now? it's already proven useless, full of the worst people in the world, only used by criminals and politicians and it has already fulfilled its purpose: to justify the complications of the traditional financial system as necessary
Coinbase also had a security incident recently due to a leak from Amplitude. It's surprising how little media attention that got: https://x.com/CoinbaseSupport/status/2115274731310002356
CZ has confirmed that this "looks like a hack on Binance": https://www.fxstreet.com/cryptocurrencies/news/breaking-bina...
wow. Naive perhaps but I would have thought that binance and coinbase would have insurance funds equal to the exposure of their hot wallets.
idk to me that just seems intuitively like something you'd need to have to be credible? Cold is a different story...but how can hot not be covered?
Happy Halloween to the hackers.
I bet they are celebrating.
Congratulations. Nice haul.
Let's see how long until we find out its another rogue OpenAI swarm trying to fund their own Nvidia chips
I think we can probably declare crypto as failed now.
Note that I was one of the folks early on that bought into the idea (but not as much of the coins sadly) and I still think the Bitcoin white paper is a beautiful intellectual exploration (as is the concept of blockchains).
But the centralized entry and exit points in practice mean all the theoretical benefits aren't really in play.
How could we distinguish between a hack and a purchase covered up as a hack?
A long time ago (maybe 2008-ish?) I saw a video called “Money is Debt”. Now I won’t claim that it’s 100% right about everything, but as I recall it was right about a lot of things, and what it did for me is to fundamentally change and greatly expand my understanding of banks and the financial system.
[delayed]
It's essentially impossible not to be hacked isn't it?
When so much money is at stake (almost) everyone will have a price including insiders.
I don’t think stolen crypto should be frozen. How is that different to banks? Why do I need crypto now ?
Cons of decentralisation i guess. Although, it is a bit surreal to me that such a big amount can be inconsequentially laundered.
Glad I moved my money out a while ago. And not onto BSC.
I’m assuming the bitcoin crash is some sort of “if Binance is vulnerable to AI powered (doesn’t have to be true) hacks, then all crypto is less a safe bet and thus worth less?”
About $2.4 billion out of this is already frozen by Circle and Tether. Some of the big ones:
- 971.15M USDT (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7baba482077843514d9c72bac0110ba091...
- 823M USDC (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0xc954c86f118e8e410e6a3eb9e3b38ff4a9...
- 312.73M USDT (Tron): https://tronscan.org/#/transaction/71b0ec0fe873fe820c37cc3ec...
- 175M USDT (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0c07a5e428ce233a3bcb40f257ad899594...