Hackers steal $100 million from crypto exchange

These exchange protocols apparently also played a role in the current attack on Binance. In a message on Twitter, billionaire Binance founder Changpeng Zhao acknowledged that there had been a “now contained” attack on a blockchain bridge. A Binance spokesman confirmed that the theft was for a total of between $100 million and $110 million. So far it has been possible to freeze seven million of them again. The affected blockchain bridge “BSC Token Hub” was initially suspended.

The exchange process across blockchain bridges uses “smart contracts” to manage the transactions. They are translated into program codes and – if all the necessary requirements are met – executed automatically. Cryptocurrencies are often touted as particularly secure due to the blockchain technology behind them, but enormous sums of money are still disappearing due to hacker attacks. The crypto data platform Chainalysis estimates the total damage caused by hacker attacks on it at two billion US dollars this year alone.

In August, cryptocurrencies worth around 190 million US dollars were stolen in a cyber attack on the crypto service provider Nomad. The so-called “Nomad Token Bridge” was affected. In February, hackers stole around 320 million US dollars from “Wormhole”, the bridge between the second largest cryptocurrency Ether and the competing project Solana.

Experts: Many perpetrators from North Korea

In one of the largest crypto thefts to date, on March 23, 2022, the perpetrators stole more than $600 million worth of digital currencies. The Ronin network, the blockchain on which the popular video game Axie Infinity is built, was affected. The attackers attacked the bridge to the Ronin blockchain, which connects the video game to others cryptoblockchains like that of the ether currency.

Axie Infinity is a computer game in which users participate in virtual battles with previously collected fantasy animals. Each of these animals is a so-called non-fungible token (NFT), a unique digital work of art. Players can also sell or rent these NFTs for profit. At the time of the robbery, Axie Infinity had around 2.5 million daily active users, according to the operator.

Experts suspect perpetrators from North Korea behind many of the attacks. According to a Chainalysis report earlier this year, North Korean hackers stole around $400 million in digital assets in at least seven attacks in 2021.

A UN report on cybercrime comes to similar conclusions. Accordingly, North Korean criminals are said to have stolen more than $50 million from at least three crypto exchanges in America, Europe and Asia between the beginning of 2020 and mid-2021. Cyber ​​attacks, especially on crypto assets, are an important source of income for North Korea, the Reuters news agency quoted from the non-public report.

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According to Chainalysis, a “large proportion of attacks this year are again from malicious actors with ties to North Korea.” The suspicion of the experts is aimed in particular at “elite hacker groups” such as Lazarus. The Lazarus Group became known with a cyber attack on the Japanese Sony group in 2014.

Tens of thousands of Sony employees’ social security numbers, passwords, and other company internals were stolen. There have been explicit threats against the Sony-produced film comedy The Interview, which is about an assassination plot against North Korea’s ruler Kim Jong Un. As a result, several US cinema chains decided to remove the film from their schedules.

More: Hackers steal $600 million in cryptocurrencies from a computer game.