The market-leading crypto exchange Binance has recovered a large part of the funds stolen in the attack on the large DeFi protocol Curve Finance.
As can be seen from a corresponding tweet by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, a total of $ 450,000 of stolen funds were frozen and recovered, which corresponds to almost 80% of the amount captured. Zhao states that the hacker tried to transfer funds to Binance in various ways, but the trading platform noticed this. The exchange is already in the process of returning the crypto assets to the rightful owners.
The Curve Finance team noticed the hack on Tuesday and asked users to stop accessing the company’s own website. Less than an hour after the warning, the development team again reported that the vulnerability had been found and fixed. Nevertheless, the hackers were able to capture about $ 537,000 in the form of the stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) by then.
According to the experts of the analysis company Elliptic, the hacker had attacked the Domain name System (DNS) of Curve Finance, which allowed the latter to wave through illegal transactions. The funds gained through this were then sent to various exchanges and crypto mixers to try to cover their tracks. Finally, the cryptocurrencies should then be deposited on Binance, which, however, was noticed by the major crypto exchange.
This is not the first case in which parts of the crypto community have been able to recover stolen funds. Only on Monday, a whitehat hacker was able to recover $32.6 million in USDC, Tether (USDT) and other altcoins withdrawn as part of the $190 million attack on Nomad.
The attack on Curve Finance is by no means the only incident in 2022. According to the analysis company Chainalysis, a whopping 2 billion US dollars have already been stolen this year from attacks on cross-chain bridges alone. This is 69% of the total funds hacked this year.