Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, was able to get back a big chunk of the money that was stolen when the decentralized finance (DeFi) system, Curve Finance, was hacked.
Binance recovers $450k of Curve Finance’s stolen assets
CEO Changpeng Zhao of Binance revealed in a tweet that the exchange has frozen and recovered $450,000 of the stolen assets, representing 83% of the total losses. Binance reportedly caught the hacker when he was trying to transfer the money via several different methods, as described by Zhao. The marketplace is making efforts to restore the money to the legitimate owners.
On Tuesday, the Curve Finance staff discovered the breach and warned its users not to use the site. The group reported that it had located and fixed the problem one hour after the first alert. After the problem was fixed, the hackers had already stolen almost $537,000 worth of Ether (ETH).
Elliptic, a blockchain analytics business, claims that a hacker hijacked Curve Finance’s DNS, resulting in malicious transactions being signed. According to the experts interviewed, the money was subsequently moved between other exchanges and crypto mixers to cover their tracks. Finally, the money was sent to Binance but was discovered by the company’s security staff.
It appears that most of the stolen funds have been recovered. FixedFloat already recovered 112 ETH after the hackers tried to launder the funds through the exchange.
Crypto hacks
It is not the first time this week that good actors in the cryptocurrency ecosystem have collaborated to return assets that have been stolen. Following the recent $190 million attack, whitehat hackers and researchers returned around $32.6 million worth of USDC, Tether (USDT), and other cryptocurrencies to Nomad on Monday.
Also, on April 22, a hacker stole $622 million from Axie Infinity’s Ronin sidechain. The Lazarus Group, a North Korean hacking group, was ultimately identified as the culprit.
The Curve Finance vulnerability is only one of numerous assaults that occurred that year. Chainalysis, an analytics business, estimates that $2 billion was stolen through cross-chain bridge attacks. It represents around two-thirds of the total amount stolen this year.
