A series of suspicious transactions on the BNB Chain resulted in the loss of approximately $80,000 worth of Bitcoin (BTC). Although this amount is relatively small compared to other crypto exploits, it has raised concerns about the attacker’s motives. It is still unclear which token contract was exploited, but on-chain security firm Cyvers suggests that the attacker could be a white hat hacker, someone who uses their skills to identify security vulnerabilities. Cyvers made this statement in a post on May 28. Cointelegraph has reached out to Cyvers for further comment.
Interestingly, the exploiter also had interactions with Binance, the largest centralized exchange in the world. Typically, sophisticated crypto hackers with malicious intentions avoid such exchanges because they require Know Your Customer (KYC) verification, which could potentially expose their identity.
This incident occurred just a week after Gala Games suffered an exploit that resulted in the loss of $23 million worth of Gala (GALA) tokens. Gala Games co-founder and CEO, Eric Schiermeyer, attributed the exploit to an issue with internal controls, which the team promptly addressed. Surprisingly, the hacker returned $22.3 million worth of Ether (ETH), almost equivalent to the market value of the 600 million GALA tokens they had stolen and sold the day before. The hacker’s wallet was frozen, leading to the return of the funds. Schiermeyer had previously identified the alleged attacker, including their home address, in a post on May 20.
This incident marks the second instance in May where a thief has decided to return stolen funds. In another case, $71 million worth of cryptocurrencies that had been stolen in a wallet poisoning scam were returned to the victim on May 12. The attacker returned the funds after their actions attracted significant attention from blockchain investigation firms. However, the nature of the on-chain transactions suggests that this attacker was not an ethical hacker but rather a malicious actor who returned the funds out of fear of the mainstream attention they received.
In other news, a Hong Kong streaming firm is set to purchase $100 million worth of cryptocurrency, while Worldcoin has faced sanctions in the Asia Express magazine.