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Recent Hack Sees HTX Lose $8 Million, Binance's CEO Offers Expertise*

HTX faces an $8 million crypto hack; Binance CEO offers support to investigate and resolve the breach.

Thu, 28 Sep 2023, 08:44 am UTC

Following the revelation of a hacking incident that saw crypto platform HTX parting with $8 million, Binance's CEO, Changpeng Zhao, extended a supportive hand, offering the skills of Binance’s top security experts to dive deep into the incident.

HTX recently changed its name from Huobi, and just a few hours after their disclosure of the financial breach, Zhao was swift to reach out. The key to resolving such issues often lies in the immediacy of the response, given that perpetrators rapidly seek to obscure their illegal gains, either through complex mixers or by converting their gains into discrete privacy tokens. In a significant discovery on September 24, Cyvers, a blockchain monitoring tool, identified malicious activity which siphoned off 5,000 Ether from an HTX hot wallet.

In an attempt to mitigate the fallout, HTX made a bold move, offering the hacker a 5% "white-hat bonus" from the stolen sum, translating to close to $400,000. The hacker has a week's window to respond to this offer, which was conveyed in Chinese.

Changpeng Zhao, in a lighter vein, remarked on the notable similarity in the names between the revamped HTX and another crypto platform, FTX, which faced its own share of controversies. However, drawing parallels between the financial losses of the two platforms would be misleading.

Chiming in on the discussion, Justin Sun, founder of Tron and adviser to HTX, confirmed that HTX users would not bear the brunt of the loss. Addressing the magnitude of the loss, Sun noted that the $8 million was quite insignificant when compared to HTX's overall asset worth of $3 billion or its fortnightly earnings. To ensure such incidents don't recur, HTX initiated real-time surveillance mechanisms. Sun, although not a primary stakeholder in HTX, pledged to hold numerous live discussions about exchange security in both English and Chinese.

Meanwhile, the previous day witnessed another cyber breach, where the decentralized Mixin Network lost a staggering $200 million due to a compromised third-party cloud database. Notably, an investigative analysis by 0xScope unearthed past connections between the hacker and Mixin Network. Last year, an account connected to this hacker was credited with 5 ETH from Mixin, which later found its way to Binance.

As for Mixin Network, resumption of deposits and withdrawals awaits the rectification of identified weaknesses, with no immediate declaration on recovering the forfeited assets for their users.

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