By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 30th, 2024
CZ affirmed that the recovered funds represent about 83% of the total stolen funds, and the exchange is currently cooperating with law enforcement agencies to help return the stolen amount.
The Binance exchange, the world’s largest crypto marketplace by trading volume has confirmed that it has helped recover or frozen the sum of $450,000 siphoned from Curve.Finance through a cybercriminal hack that saw $570,000 looted earlier this week.
Hackers generally seem to forget that trading platforms are constantly monitoring their criminal activities, and a slight error to siphon the funds they stole can attract unprecedented action.
“Curve. finance had their DNS hijacked in the past hour. Hacker put a malicious contract on the home page. When the victim approved the contract, it would drain the wallet. Damage is around $570k so far. We are monitoring,” Binance Chief Executive Officer, Changpeng Zhao, known also as ‘CS’ said in a tweet when the exploit happened on Tuesday.
Binance froze/recovered $450k of the Curve stolen funds, representing 83%+ of the hack. We are working with LE to return the funds to the users. The hacker kept on sending the funds to Binance in different ways, thinking we can't catch it. 😂#SAFU https://t.co/Ekea9moeAw
— CZ 🔶 BNB (@cz_binance) August 12, 2022
According to the latest tweet from the Binance boss, it was revealed that the hackers tried to send the funds to the trading platform in different ways, thinking the move will not be discovered, but the opposite was what happened. CZ affirmed that the recovered funds represent about 83% of the total stolen funds, and the exchange is currently cooperating with law enforcement agencies to help return the stolen amount.
The rate of hacking has grown remarkably over the past 12 months with protocols across several layer-1 and 2 protocols suffering the brunts of it. The hackers are typically left with fewer options concerning the laundering of the funds. The United States Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has placed sanctions on the industry’s two most popular crypto mixing protocols, Blender.io and most recently Tornado Cash.
The crypto mixers help to obfuscate the source of the funds and the final destination so that law enforcement will find it very difficult to track.
Binance Playing a Key Role in Hack Events
In recent times, the role of the Binance Exchange in hack events has become much more conspicuous, with the trading platform also helping to recover as much as $5.8 million of funds stolen from Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge in a hack that is tagged as the largest in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
For the records, while the recovered $5.8 million is just but a tiny fraction when compared to the total funds carted away which official figures pegged at about $625 million, Binance’s effort was very much appreciated by the community.
With hackers notably getting away with the bulk of stolen funds, the role Binance is playing will further establish the cryptocurrency trading platform as a hub with advanced transaction monitoring. With this designation, hackers may learn their lesson and steer clear of the exchange in the foreseeable future, hence, depriving them of the option to launder their funds as not many trading platforms are as liquid as Binance.