Since yesterday, a large group of social media users have been raising the alarm that currency and cryptocurrency funds are being withdrawn from their Binance exchange accounts without their consent. However, Binance exchange administrators reassure that they have not fallen victim to hackers.
Since yesterday, a large group of social media users have been raising the alarm that currency and cryptocurrency funds are being withdrawn from their Binance exchange accounts without their consent. However, Binance exchange administrators reassure that they have not fallen victim to hackers.
“All funds are safe,” writes the CEO of the stock exchange, Changpeng Zhao, in one of his tweets.
According to Zhao, the isolated cases of loss of funds that we have seen in recent hours were the result of phishing attacks on individual exchange users and breaking access to their accounts, and not a top-down hack on the exchange itself. As a preventive measure, Binance has decided to temporarily block the possibility of making withdrawals from the exchange.
“We have located cases of illegal trading, these (transactions) have been reversed. Thanks to the quick alert, all funds are safe. Please make sure to secure your accounts against phishing attacks,” Changpeng Zhao said in another tweet.
How did the theft mechanism work? Through the aforementioned phishing attacks, the fraudsters probably managed to gain access to a certain number of API keys of individual users, used, among other things, to conduct automated trading on the stock exchange, often through so-called trading bots.
API keys provide full access to trading options, but do not allow funds to be withdrawn from a given exchange account. Therefore, in this case, the method of “cryptocurrency laundering” was used – for this purpose, the little-known Viacoin coin was used, but it is available on the Binance exchange, which was sold at an inflated rate to the account of the compromised accounts for bitcoins. These, in turn, were withdrawn from their own accounts, in small quantities (so as not to arouse the suspicions of the exchange) by the fraudsters to their wallets.
With daily trading volume regularly exceeding $2 billion and a user base of over 6 million, Binance is now the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. Its owner, Changpeng Zhao, was recently ranked third on Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people to have made their fortune in cryptocurrencies. Zhao’s net worth is currently estimated at $1.1 billion to $2 billion.
