Binance Recovers $450K Of Stolen Funds

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao on Friday said the cryptocurrency exchange has recovered $450,000 worth of funds stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Curve Finance.

Hackers had stolen about $570,000 last Tuesday. The protocol’s developers said the source of the issue had been identified and fixed.

“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,” Zhao said.

The exchange is currently working with law enforcement agencies to return the funds to their rightful owners, according to Zhao.

The protocol had its DNS hijacked last Tuesday, with the hacker putting a malicious contract on the home page. 

Termed cache poisoning, attackers modified the server to look like the original webpage and deceived users into entering what they believed to be protected information.

When the victim approved a contract, it would drain the wallet.

Whitehat hackers to the rescue

This is not the first time good actors in the crypto community have rallied together to recover stolen funds.

In a major hack involving a crypto project, impersonators on Aug. 2 had drained cross-chain bridge Nomad of about $191 million, nearly emptying the wallet funds.

Following the hack, whitehat hackers and researchers gave Nomad returned around $32.6 million in USDC, Tether (USDT), and other cryptos last Monday.

Cross-chain bridges have recently been attacked a number of times by hackers.

Recently, concentrated liquidity pool Crema Finance suffered an exploit that resulted in over $9 million being stolen. After intense negotiations, the hacker agreed to return most of the funds for a $1.6 million bounty.

Also, Layer 1 blockchain protocol Harmony Protocol suffered a theft on the Horizon bridge, amounting to around $100 million in which tokens including Wrapped Ethereum (WETH), AAVE, SUSHI, DAI, Tether (USDT), and USD Coin were stolen. The hacker rejected a $1 million bounty offered as part of negotiations.

In January, Qubit Finance’s bridge was hacked for $80 million and a month later, bad actors stole $320 million from the Wormhole bridge.

In March, $622 million worth of Ethereum and USDC were stolen from Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge.