Follow up on Beetoken and Binance “hack”.
Any news on possible hacking of any site involved in crypto world always gets lots of attentions. In many cases this news prove to be simple FUD. Let’s look at recent cases and try to get to the bottom of this.
Beetoken ICO Hacked
The case with Beetoken ICO was well covered in my previous post. If you haven’t yet seen it or don’t know anything about this events check the article first. On this week Beetoken team released official update in the incident. You can check it yourself here.
According to official notice Bee Token itself was never hacked. Instead, it appears that there was unauthorized access to one of Bee Token’s third party vendors. Team doesn’t gives any more details on this and doesn’t give vendor name. Actually it is a normal practice not to reveal such details. So what data was stolen? According to the team:
The data that was potentially accessed includes email addresses, first names, and last names only, and this impacted < 1% of our email list.
Previously a lot of users thought KYC information was stolen, but now it seems it wasn’t that bad. It is difficult to check if it is really true, but I haven’t found any case where scam email had any personal information other than name and email address. Moreover KYC data was managed by Onfido and this company has a good reputation. We don’t have any evidence it could be hacked. So I believe the team is telling the truth. Now Beetoken team is open for communication again. You can report such issues here or ask your question in official telegram group.
Summarizing all the above the hack was real, had a huge impact but wasn’t as critical as all investors feared. The Bee Token team did well handling this case.
Binance hacked.
A lot of people all over the world were terrified as binance site became unavailable. News sites and youtube channels exploded with lots of versions. The most popular was a major hack that pushed binance to go offline. Binance users were panicking and reading FUD instead of checking official information. Binance twitter account kept us updated on the issue. So what happened? It was well described by Binance CEO:
We experienced a server issue on our replica database cluster, causing some data to be out of sync. Need to fully resync from master. Due the size of the data, it will take several hours. No data is lost. We appreciate your understanding and support.
As a software architect I can say the team did an amazing job to recover the site so fast. Official twitter page was posting updates frequently to keep us posted. Exchanges as well as other service providers spend lots of money, time and efforts to protect data and application servers from hardware issues, but whatever you do, you just can’t make your system completely immune. When a part of a cluster goes down it takes time to recover the system. From all information I was able to found, Binance team has proper skills to do their job. Now site is available again and users can check themselves that their funds are still there.
In the end, I want to warn you again: Always check all information yourself using different sources. Never panic and stay safe. Have a nice day, Cryptohumster out.