From CryptoPotato · By Wayne Jones
Binance co-CEO Richard Teng told the exchange’s customers that the company will cover all losses after a security incident estimated to have impacted $6.3 billion.
Additionally, Binance has conceded that the compromised laptop, which was initially blamed for the breach, was not the only factor, as investigators have found additional points of attack.
Binance Working With Law Enforcement
In an X post, Teng said that the initial investigations suggested that an attacker may have gained access through a DevOps engineer’s compromised laptop, which allowed them to get into a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawals. However, he cautioned against reducing the incident to one employee’s permissions or a single click.
“To be clear: the attacker did not simply use one engineer’s permissions, and this was not a single “one-click” action,” the executive explained. “It involved a more complex attack process. Our investigation has not attributed responsibility to any individual.”
Regarding what the exchange had done since the hack, the co-CEO pointed out that it had temporarily stopped withdrawals and had performed a complete security revamp of the whole withdrawal service and addresses connected to it. Binance also revoked the authorizations of affected addresses and has invited law enforcement agencies and on-chain intelligence firms to help trace and recover the money.
A later update from Binance changed the picture further, with the exchange saying subsequent investigations had uncovered “additional points of breach,” although it didn’t say exactly what they were.
Teng added that the company had found no evidence of a private key leak and that about $3 billion of the $6.3 billion that had been stolen had been frozen on-chain with the help of “blockchain partners.” Furthermore, he reiterated that customer funds were safe and that Binance will cover all losses from its SAFU fund as well as additional funds from the company.
Public Criticism Grows
Many X users responded positively to Teng’s explanation, praising the crypto firm’s “strong” leadership and transparency. Others were just relieved that their funds were safe.
However, some were less accommodating. One of them, the NFT account Chill Pill, which has a following just shy of 100,000, said it “wouldn’t trust Binance” at this point. Meanwhile, self-described crypto watchdog MASTR called the exchange incompetent and suggested that if it sold more assets to reimburse users, it could add pressure on the wider market.
Others, like former X head of product Nikita Bier, laid into Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, calling him a “nomadic autistic man” and questioning his “funds are SAFU” response to the biggest crypto hack in history.