Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, said on Friday, October 30, that its initial investigation into a major security incident points to a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, which may have allowed an attacker to access a service container and submit unauthorised withdrawal transactions. The exchange put the estimated total impact at around $6.3 billion and said it has found no evidence that any wallet private keys were leaked.

Source: Binance official announcement

Binance said about $3 billion of the affected assets have been frozen on-chain so far, working with blockchain partners, token issuers and law enforcement. According to FinanceFeeds' reporting of the freeze effort, Tether froze more than 1.567 billion USDT and Circle froze more than 800 million USDC in coordination with law enforcement, accounting for most of the frozen total. Frozen assets cannot be moved by the holder, but freezing is not the same as recovery.

Source: FinanceFeeds

The exchange said it will cover all losses from its SAFU emergency fund and company funds, reiterated that user funds are safe, and said it will publish an updated Proof of Reserves once remediation is complete. As a precaution, all deposits and withdrawals remain temporarily suspended while security checks continue, and authorisations for the affected addresses have been revoked.

Outside analysts' estimates of the suspicious outflows have differed from Binance's own figure: blockchain analysts tracked about $3.3 billion leaving Binance hot wallets on Ethereum, while other tallies across Ethereum, Bitcoin and Tron ran as high as about $5.8 billion. Those figures are analyst estimates, not Binance's confirmed loss figure; the exchange has said it will share only confirmed figures and will publish a detailed technical post-mortem once its investigation is complete and the facts are verified.

Source: HackRead