BNB Chain exploited for $80K of fake BTC tokens — TradingView News

Update May 29, 11:00 UTC: This article has been updated to include clarification from BNB Chain.

Approximately $80,000 worth of a BEP-20 token labeled as ‘BTC’ was lost in an exploit on the BNB Chain involving multiple suspicious transactions.

While $80,000 is considered a small amount compared to the average crypto exploits, it raised questions about the attacker’s intentions.

While the exploited token contract is still unknown, the attacker could be a white hat hacker, or ethical hacker, who uses his skills to find security vulnerabilities, according to on-chain security firm Cyvers. The firm wrote in a May 28 X post:

“The total loss is approximately $80K. The attacker received funding via TornadoCash and has also interacted with the Binance exchange, indicating a possible white hat action.”

Cointelegraph has approached Cyvers for comment.

Following the reports, the BNB Chain Core Development Team identified the attack as a price manipulation exploit targeting a BEP-20 token labeled as “BTC.” In an email to Cointelegraph, the BNB Chain Core Development Team wrote:

“The token involved is not the genuine Bitcoin (BTC) representation on BSC but a different token with a similar symbol.”

Despite receiving funding from the cryptocurrency mixing service Tornado Cash, the exploiter also interacted with Binance, the world’s largest centralized exchange.

Sophisticated crypto hackers with malicious intent avoid interacting with large centralized exchanges like Binance, which require Know Your Customer (KYC) verification and could lead to discovering the identity of malicious actors.

Despite also interacting with Binance, the attacker is not a white hat, according to the BNB Chain Core Development Team:

“The attacker was funded via Tornado Cash and transferred 1 BNB to a Binance deposit wallet, but this does not indicate white hat (ethical hacker) intentions.”

Some hacks have a happy ending

The potential exploit comes a week after Gala Games was exploited for $23 million worth of Gala (GALA) tokens. According to Gala Games co-founder and CEO Eric Schiermeyer, the exploit occurred due to an issue with “internal controls,” which the team has since fixed.

The Gala Games incident is completely unrelated to the BNB chain exploit.

In an unexpected turn of events, the hacker returned $22.3 million worth of Ether ETHUSD — close to the market value of the 600 million GALA they stole and sold a day earlier — after the attacker’s wallet was frozen with the stolen funds.

The return of the funds came after Gala’s co-founder and CEO, Eric Schiermeyer, said in a May 20 X and Discord post that the alleged attacker had been identified, including “his home address.” 

This is the second time in May that a thief has had a change of heart and returned stolen funds.$3 billion stolen in hacks — Why are crypto crimes surging?. Source: Cointelegraph

Earlier this month, $71 million worth of cryptocurrencies stolen from a recent wallet poisoning scam was been returned to the victim.

The unknown attacker returned the $71 million on May 12 after the high-profile phishing incident caught the attention of multiple blockchain investigation firms.

However, on-chain transactions suggest that the attacker wasn’t an ethical hacker but a malicious actor who got scared of the mainstream attention and decided to return the funds.