Hackers have made off with over £31million worth of Bitcoins from the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world in terms of trading volume. The Binance Exchange is a trading platform for crypto-currencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. With the Binance market hovering around the billion dollar mark, it was a prime target for hackers.
Biding their time, hackers managed to acquire account details through the use of multiple different strategies, such as phishing and viruses. Striking all at once, the hackers made off with over 7000 Bitcoins, worth over £4,500 each. Binance Exchange did, however, announce that it would be replacing all of the lost coins with it’s emergency insurance fund.
In the same statement they say, “It was unfortunate that we were not able to block this withdrawal before it was executed. Once executed, the withdrawal triggered various alarms in our system. We stopped all withdrawals immediately after that.”
Deposits and withdrawals will be frozen for the whole week following the attack, so crypto-traders are still going to have to wait a few days to get access to their funds, although they can still trade with the funds available in their accounts.
Other big names in the market also offered to help out by investing their own money to firm up the market, so in the end this didn’t impact the market too heavily. However, this attack does raise questions for the security industry as a whole. Considering the $470million attack back in 2014, how much more sophisticated has the technology become? Are hackers just getting that much smarter? If such technologically advanced companies are suffering from attacks, how will other industries fare?
Luckily most industries don’t have to worry about their products being stolen online, but there is still a massive threat from other attacks such as ransomware and data breaches, so this isn’t something that can be ignored.