The incident itself occurred on October 29. Experts and official authorities concluded that North Korea was behind the attack. The hackers stole a wide variety of cryptocurrencies, ranging from Bitcoin to lesser-known tokens, so it took the exchange quite some time to track them down and buy them back.
To recover as much of the funds as possible as quickly as possible, Binance began using its own reserves and accumulated profits immediately after the hack. Previously, platform representatives had warned that it might take longer to return the remaining 10 percent.
In a post on social media platform X, the company thanked users and the entire community for their patience and understanding.
To cover their tracks, the hackers employed highly sophisticated tactics. They transferred tokens through thousands of wallets and across numerous different blockchains. In addition, meme coins were used to launder approximately $430,000 of the stolen funds.
According to analysts at Elliptic, at least 65,000 transactions were carried out using more than 20,000 wallets in just one week after the hack. If you do the math, it looked as if a new wallet was created every 30 seconds, and a transaction was carried out every 10 seconds. At the same time, experts at Chainalysis found that money-laundering networks based in China were used to convert the stolen assets into fiat currency.
Most likely, it all started with phishing. It is believed that the hackers attempted to lure one of the company’s engineers with a fake job offer.