A hacker reportedly stole $27 million in cryptocurrency from a Binance-connected wallet.
The stolen tether funds were converted to ether before being transferred to other exchanges and bridges to bitcoin through the THORChain bridge, CoinDesk reported Monday (Nov. 13).
The victim’s wallet had received ether through two separate wallets from the Binance deployer in 2019, per the report, which cited on-chain data.
A deployer wallet is used to create smart contracts, the report said. Binance’s deployer wallet has been inactive for nearly three years.
“The user made a withdrawal from Binance, which was valid and authorized on our platform,” a Binance spokesperson said in the report. “Unfortunately, the DeFi wallet that received the withdrawal was compromised. While this is outside of our scope of control, Binance’s security team is looking into the matter, and we will provide assistance where we can.”
THORchain has found itself at the center of a few high-profile hacks this year, according to the report. For example, hackers used the network to mask the theft of $35 million from Atomic Wallet in June.
In October, THORSwap went into maintenance mode after a series of trades related to last year’s hack on FTX.
The original theft — involving roughly $372 million, happened Nov. 11, 2022, hours after FTX’s bankruptcy declaration. Last month, about $4 million of that stolen crypto resurfaced, some of it moving via the THORchain router, which lets users swap tokens between different blockchains.
The latest hack follows an incident in September in which the digital asset transaction network Mixin halted withdrawals and deposits after a $200 million hack.
Last year saw decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms hit hard by hacks. DeFi is a type of financial technology that uses distributed ledger technology, including blockchains that support crypto transactions, in place of traditional financial intermediaries and trust mechanisms with peer-to-peer protocols and smart contracts.
DeFi protocols and platforms suffered the largest breaches in 2022, making up 82.1% of all stolen assets, or $3.1 billion.
That figure was up from 73.3% in 2021, with 64% of the losses suffered by DeFi actors originating with cross-chain bridge protocols.
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