Around $450,000 worth of the stolen assets were recovered and frozen by Binance, accounting for almost 80% of the total stolen amounts.
The decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Curve Finance was recently hacked and the theft sought Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, to cash in the stolen funds but a significant portion of the funds were recovered.
The exchange has frozen and recovered $450,000 of the stolen assets, or more than 80% of the stolen monies, according to a tweet from Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.
Zhao says that the hacker made several attempts to transfer money to the exchange but was caught by Binance. Currently, the exchange is striving to refund the money to its rightful owners.
On Tuesday, the Curve Finance team discovered the intrusion and warned their users not to use their website. The team declared that it had discovered and fixed the problem an hour after issuing the alert. Before the problem was fixed, the attackers were still able to steal USD Coin (USDC) worth about $537,000 from the system.
Experts from the blockchain analytics company Elliptic claim that Curve Finance’s domain name system (DNS) was infiltrated by a hacker, which led to the signing of malicious transactions. The assets were subsequently transferred to various exchanges and cryptocurrency mixers in an effort to obfuscate the trail. In the end, the money was sent to Binance, where its staff successfully intercepted it.
The good people in the cryptocurrency ecosystem have been working to return stolen funds several times this week. Following the recent $190 million exploit, whitehat hackers and researchers gave back to Nomad on Monday an estimated $32.6 million in USDC, Tether (USDT), and other altcoins.
There were numerous cyberattacks in 2022, the Curve Finance vulnerability being only one of them. Cross-chain bridge attacks resulted in the loss of $2 billion in money, claims analytics company Chainalysis. This represents 69% of the total amount taken throughout the year.