Binance Restores Withdrawals After $6.3 Billion Hack as Fake Interviews Tricked Engineer Into Malware Download
Updated
Updated · Yahoo Finance · Nov 3
Binance Restores Withdrawals After $6.3 Billion Hack as Fake Interviews Tricked Engineer Into Malware Download
3 articles · Updated · Yahoo Finance · Nov 3
Summary
Binance said withdrawals are back to normal and 98% of affected assets have been replenished after the Oct. 29 theft, with customer losses covered by its reserve fund.
Weeks of fake recruiting helped enable the breach: attackers staged two interviews, built trust through a sham HR contact, then got an engineer to install malware disguised as a test file.
The company said the interview ruse was only one step in a months-long campaign that began in June, spread across multiple employee devices and later reached systems used to authorize wallet transactions.
On Oct. 20, hackers used the compromised laptop to infiltrate two other employees' computers, then used stolen credentials days later to trigger the malware behind the unauthorized transfers.
About half of the stolen assets were frozen by issuers including Tether and Circle, while Binance processed $4.649 billion in withdrawals and about $1.01 billion in deposits after briefly suspending withdrawals.