January 17, 2019 | AtoZ Markets - Binance, the global cryptocurrency exchange has frozen some of the funds that were stolen from Cryptopia's crypto exchange during a hack that was reported earlier this week.
Binance CEO is questioning hackers sanity
Binance which provides a platform for trading over 100 cryptocurrencies and supports upcoming Ethereum's Constantinople Hard Fork. Since the beginning of 2018, Binance is considered the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world in terms of trading volume.
The company’s CEO Changpeng Zhao in his twitter announced on early Wednesday morning, that Binance halted certain funds which were stolen from the New Zealand crypto exchange. In his message, Zhao wonders why the attackers, indifferent to the rapid spread of news and that crypto-exchange is not shy to stop the flow of stolen funds, continue to send the stolen funds to Binance.
Cryptopia experienced significant losses
As previously mentioned, Cryptopia reported on the cyber attack on Twitter on Monday. The company based in New Zealand said that hacking caused it to suffer "significant losses." As reported, the damage amounted to Ethereum (ETH) worth at least $ 2.4 million in several unknown wallets. In addition, he moved to centralized management (CENNZ) in the amount of about 1.2 million dollars.
However, it is still not clear who was the security breach, which led to the redistribution of the stolen funds through Binance and other exchanges. Some experts suggested that Cryptopia could make transfers for security reasons.
Changpeng Zhao tweet causes controversial reactions
The day after Cryptopia announced a hack, Zhao tweeted a message which received a significant backlash. In this tweet, he apparently advised cryptographic owners to keep their assets on stock exchanges, rather than on personal storage devices such as USB drives or hardware wallets. Some have perceived Zhao’s tweet as meaning that the risk of self-preservation is significantly higher than the risk of storing cryptocurrency on “reputable” exchanges, such as Binance, for example. However, Zhao later said that he did not necessarily advise investors to keep funds on the exchanges.
Cyber attacks are becoming mainstream in 2019?
According to the news sources for the first half of 2018, more than 731 million dollars were exchanged for the exchange of hacks. Much of this loss, $ 500 million, occurred as a result of a Coincheck hack in January 2018. There were no more hacking exchanges on the scale of the Mt Gox hacking in 2014, which turned the cryptocurrency space upside down.
The recent 51% attack on Ethereum Classic contributed to the growing public awareness about the blockchain platform's security. Although, part of the ETH loses was promised to be compensated there are still concerns surrounding digital assets. Such security breaches are a serious risk to long-term stability and the adoption of cryptocurrency. Continuing violations using basic hacking tools and methods can undermine investor confidence in the public market.
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