Binance hack may involve private key ‘misuse,’ not theft: Blockaid CEO
Blockaid’s Ido Ben-Natan suspects attackers manipulated Binance’s transaction-signing infrastructure, drawing parallels with the Bybit hack.
The suspected multi-billion-dollar Binance hack may have involved attackers manipulating the exchange’s transaction-signing signature rather than stealing private keys, according to Blockaid co-founder and CEO Ido Ben-Natan.
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Ben-Natan said Blockaid’s preliminary assessment pointed to “key misuse,” in which attackers trick or compromise a signing system into authorizing malicious transactions without extracting the underlying private key.
“It seems to be… a compromise of signing infrastructure. We don’t think a key was leaked,” he said.
Ben-Natan said this was a preliminary assessment, drawing on their experience with similar attacks and their observations of the onchain activity.
Binance has not confirmed the precise method that allowed hackers to steal over $2.5 billion in crypto from the exchange — the largest crypto hack in history.