Binance, the world’s biggest exchange for crypto-assets, has today disclosed that the firm has lost $100 million in cryptocurrency to scammers.
The Company’s Chief, Changpeng Zhao said on his Twitter that “an exploit” in the system led to extra production of the exchange’s dedicated currency, adding the current impact estimate is around $100million.
He said that the theft involved used “an exploit on a cross-chain bridge, BSC Token Hub”, adding that the incident is among the biggest thefts in cryptocurrency history.
Zhao said that it is still better as compared to the mammoth heist of more than $500 million from the Axie Infinity blockchain game earlier this year.
Activities of scammers on the internet space are daily on the surge and they keep using weaknesses in “cross-chain bridges,” the means used by investors to move assets from one blockchain to another.
Blockchains are digital ledgers that store details of transactions, the biggest is bitcoin but there are a thousand of others.
Zhao, also wrote that the Axie Infinity hack and another heist last month on crypto firm Nomad of almost $200 million too involved the exploitation of bridges.
He however said $7 million had already been recovered, but the exchange said on Reddit that the amount taken was between $100 and $110 million.
It was reported that a crypto analysis firm, Elliptic, said in its crime report this week that “bridges tend to accumulate large amounts of locked assets on numerous blockchains, many of which may not have advanced security or auditing cultures due to their relative obscurity.”
Another crypto analysis firm, Chainalysis, also reported that as of August 2022, bridge exploits had accounted for around $2 billion in thefts this year already, making bridges an attractive target for cybercriminals in the past.
