Ankr hack ensued to Binance freezing $3M crypto assets

The hack on Ankr, a crypto Web3 infrastructure provider, resulted in Binance freezing about $3 million worth of cryptocurrency. The millions of digital assets stolen from Ankr forced the platform to cover all the losses so that users would not suffer.

Ankr’s security team launched an investigation, revealing that the damage totalled a maximum of $5 million BNB tokens from liquidity pools.

 

In a statement, Ankr said they are working on fixing the damage caused by the hack.

 

The CEO of the crypto platform giant Binance told the public that the company paused withdrawals for Ankr tokens. They also shared that the security incident on Ankr had originated from a hacked developer’s private key, a passcode used in cryptography.

Ankr’s representative stated that they understand the incident’s concern within its community. They are working hard to mitigate the problem and have implemented necessary measures to prevent similar incidents from reoccurring.

Based on investigations, an unauthorised entity used the stolen private key to mint six quadrillion worth of Ankr’s cryptocurrency, aBNBc. Once the hacker acquired the aBNBC tokens, they exchanged them for other digital assets, including about 4.5 million USDC and then swapped it for ETH.

Then, the hacker sent about $3 million of the stolen assets to a cryptocurrency mixing tumbler, Tornado Cash, often used by cybercriminals to hide sources of funds and turn cryptocurrency tokens into fiat.

Tornado Cash’s service ensures that its clients’ source of funds is untraceable for the privacy of assets going through it. Analysts said that the hackers against Ankr now have over $1 million worth of ETH, $29,000 worth of Binance coin, and over $775,000 worth of Polygon (MATIC) in its wallet.

In a connected incident, another cryptocurrency platform, Helio, announced via Twitter that it was compromised following the Ankr hack. Thus, security analysts were unsure how much the total amount was stolen in the attack. Helio released no further comments about the incident.

Currently, there is an estimate that at least $15 million worth of cryptocurrency was stolen from the attack. For this year, over $3.37 billion has been stolen from cryptocurrency platforms, which indicates that all digital companies must upgrade their security measures more as cybercriminals have also been evolving their tactics.