In brief
Nearly $80,000 worth of Bitcoin has been lost because of a potential exploit on the BNB chain. Even though this amount is less than most cryptocurrency exploits, it has raised questions about the criminals’ intentions. Cyvers, an on-chain security company, speculates that the attacker may be an ethical hacker.
Recognizing the Assailant
It is still unknown who has the exploited token contracts. According to security company Cyvers, the attacker may actually be a white-hat hacker—an ethical hacker who finds security flaws. Cyvers wrote in a post on May 28 that the total loss was about $80,000. The hackers may have engaged in white-hat activity as they communicated with the Binance exchange and received funding using TornadoCash.
Despite collecting cash from bitcoin mixing service Tornado Cash, the exploiter also used Binance, the world’s largest centralized exchange. Particularly, hostile crypto hackers frequently avoid major centralized exchanges such as Binance because of the mandatory Know Your Customer (KYC) authentication, which may reveal their identity.
Recent Crypto Exploits
The potential vulnerability targets the Gala Games in response to a recent incident. Gala Games lost $23 million worth of GALA tokens because of internal control problems. A shocking incident happened when the hacker returned Ether worth $22.3 million. His wallet was credited with the stolen amount, which was approximately equal to the market value of the stolen GALA tokens.
The victim of a wallet poisoning scheme earlier this month got back $71 million in stolen cryptocurrencies. The money was returned after receiving a lot of attention from blockchain research companies. However, on-chain transactions show the attacker was not an ethical hacker, despite this. Instead, they argue that the man was a dishonest actor who returned the money out of concern for public scrutiny.
