Binance Hit By $570 Million Blockchain Bridge Hack

investopedia.com:

Hackers have stolen $570 million from a blockchain linked with Binance. The largest crypto exchange has had to temporarily halt the operation of its Binance Smart Chain after the exploit.Since the hack, Binance Coin's (BNB) price has also dropped noticeably, with the token down 3.5% in the last 24 hours. At the time of writing, it is trading at $281.

According to Binance's BNB Chain blog, hackers drained 2 million BNB tokens from the network on October 6, which is about $570 million at current prices.Binance co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao said that the exploit was on a cross-chain bridge, BSC Token Hub, which resulted in extra BNB tokens being created out of thin air. A cross-chain bridge lets users port their digital assets from one blockchain to another. The BSC Token Hub is a bridge between the BNB Beacon Chain (BEP2) and the BNB Chain (BEP20 or BSC). The exchange asked validators to temporarily suspend the network, and Zhao confirmed that users’ funds were safe.

Binance has resumed operations of the BSC chain after releasing a software update that froze the hackers’ accounts. Operations restarted at around 06:40 UTC. Following the resolution, Zhao praised the BNB team, saying that they handled the issue quickly and with transparency and responsibility. The team also posted an update on the matter, saying that a new on-chain governance mechanism would be introduced on the BNB chain to combat future attacks.

There will also be governance votes to determine whether to freeze the hacked funds and whether to use BNB Auto-Burn to cover the remaining hacked funds. A governance vote will also decide whether a white hat program that will reward the discovery of bugs to the tune of $1 million should be implemented, as well