The largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, resumed trading on July 4 and confirmed that it was attacked by hackers who manipulated the price of Syscoin (SYS). Binance has taken security measures and created a new fund to protect users in the future.
In an official statement released on Wednesday, Binance said it detected anomalous activity with the SYS token. A large number of transactions were carried out using the API. The exchange suspended withdrawals and other transactions, citing "system maintenance." Official comments were postponed until the technical details of the situation were clarified. Yesterday, exchange representatives detailed the incident in a report, and Binance resumed operations. All trading tools are once again available to users.
The Binance trading platform allows traders to make trades using the API. As the site’s technical staff found out, hackers managed to gain access to a large number of traders’ API keys, which made it possible to create trading activity using a huge number of trading bots.
According to the Syscoin developers, a billion SYS was mined from one block and was sold through one account on Binance. Using compromised keys, hackers bought SYS, artificially inflating the price. The overall price increase rose to 96 BTC per token, which allowed them to make a profit of $6.23 million. Due to such an abnormal growth in the rate, the attack was noticed quickly enough, and exchange staff took retaliatory measures.
Binance deleted all the compromised keys and invited traders to create new ones. The crypto platform also announced an exemption from exchange commissions until July 14 for all victims of the overnight hacker attack and offered other traders a 70% discount within the same time frame. The discount will be paid in Binance Coin (BNB).
Remember that Binance has already been attacked this year. Back in early March, the exchange managed to prevent a well-organized attack, which also involved theft of API keys. Then hackers powerfully pumped up the price of Viacoin (VIA).
Recent events prompted the exchange to create the Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU). The funds from the fund will be used as an insurance fund for site clients affected by such attacks.
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