It’s every crypto investor’s worst nightmare. You wake up to the headline that one of your main exchanges has been hacked.
That’s what happened last week with Binance, which happens to be my favorite exchange.
It all started last Tuesday when rumors started to swirl that bitcoin was plummeting due to a Binance hack.
Of course, when you hear plummet and hack in the same sentence it can cause your heart to sink.
There were lots of comments on the message boards like My Binance Account got HACKED!. It seem some customers were missing funds.
It didn’t take long for Binance to respond and articles were out like this one saying all the funds were safe.
It turns out it wasn’t a hack at all, but a large scale phishing attempt.
The hacker stole a bunch of accounting using phishing techniques like fake website addresses. Then the hacker also set up a bunch of separate accounts for them self. Then when the time was right they used the stolen accounts to pump VIA coin and use their accounts to sell into it.
Binance posted about the incident here. Two good insights. The first is that their risk management system triggered which halted withdrawals. And the second is that they were able to freeze the funds deposited by the hacker.
So Binance won this battle. And the hacker’s funds will be donated to charity. That’s great!
And it has also inspired Binance to launch the development of Binance Chain, its decentralized exchange model.
Binance Coin (BNB) will be upgraded to exist on its own blockchain mainnet, becoming a native coin. At the same time, Binance will transition from being a company to a community.
That’s awesome. I’m looking forward to Binance’s decentralized exchange, what about you?
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