Web3 Infrastructure Provider Ankr Vows to Restore Hacked $5M

Ankr has become the latest cryptocurrency-related firm to be hacked.

The Web3 infrastructure provider tweeted Thursday (Dec. 1): “Our aBNB token has been exploited, and we are currently working with exchanges to immediately halt trading.”

Our aBNB token has been exploited, and we are currently working with exchanges to immediately halt trading.

— Ankr (@ankr) December 2, 2022

In a thread launched Friday (Dec. 2), Ankr provided an update in which it said that a hacker had compromised a deployer’s private key and drained $5 million, adding that decentralized exchanges (DEXs) quickly halted the trading of aBNB tokens.

“We are grateful to our community of DEXs, exchanges and protocols that all helped us end the exploit,” Ankr said in the thread. “We will use reserves to compensate liquidity providers for the aBNBc pools.”

In a Friday blog post, Ankr Co-founder and CEO Chandler Song wrote: “Hacks and exploits from bad actors like this are an unfortunate possibility in Web3, even with every attention to detail in security processes — but we were well prepared. Unlike previous events in the space this year, we are doing the right thing by our community and ensuring that this is taken care of immediately with lost funds restored.”

Bloomberg reported Friday that the aBNBc token, which had been trading near $300 a day earlier, is now worthless.

Part of the token’s value came from its link to Binance Coin, which gave the holders of that coin ways to earn returns, according to the report.

Among the firms that contributed to stopping the theft was Binance.

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, tweeted during the hack: “Binance paused withdrawals a few [hours] ago. Also froze about [$3 million] that hackers [moved] to our CEX.”

Possible hacks on Ankr and Hay. Initial analysis is developer private key was hacked, and the hacker updated the smart contract to a more malicious one. Binance paused withdrawals a few hrs ago. Also froze about $3m that hackers move to our CEX.

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) December 2, 2022

Ankr joins a long list of firms to be hacked.

During the first seven months of the year, the losses from crypto hacks added up to $1.9 billion — a 60% increase from the $1.2 billion in losses recorded at the same time in 2021, Chainalysis said in August.

Among the incidents to happen since then was a loss of about $160 million in digital assets to a theft by hackers suffered by cryptocurrency trader Wintermute in September.

Also in September, multichain decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Kyber Network said it removed an attack vector that was used in an exploit that saw $265,000 stolen.

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