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DeFi Ankr loses $5 million in an exploit and Binance blocks its token withdrawals

Published

2 years ago

2 December 2022

Key facts:

Binance blocked Ankr token withdrawals and blocked $3 million that the hacker sent to the exchange.
The attackers reportedly took possession of millions of dollars that they sent to Unisawp and other services.

The decentralized finance protocol (DeFi) Ankr fell victim to an attacker who exploited a vulnerability, managing to extract 6 quadrillion tokens in the early hours of Friday, Dec. 2.

The attack was reported initially by analysts at the Lookonchain and then confirmed from ANK’s official Twitter account.

The attackers allegedly targeted Ankr Reward Bearing Staked BNB (aBNBc), namely, Ankr tokens wrapped in BNBs. or based on a collateral equivalent in Binance’s native cryptocurrency exchange. As a result, the token has lost 99 percent of its value, as reported by data by CoinGecko.

According to the signature Research firm PeckShield, the code behind the Ankr contract allows any user to ment an unlimited amount of protocol tokens.protocol tokens, without any verification, which the attacker used to his advantage.

Later, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) reported that the exchange stopped withdrawals of the aBNBc token following the incident.

CZ added that. Binance had also frozen about “$3 million that the attacker moved.” to our exchange.”

According to lookonchain, the stolen funds were sent to other services such as Uniswap, Tornado Cash, and various bridges to exchange and obfuscate assets, earning about $5 million in stablecoins.

The team behind the Ankr protocol has indicated that they are doing their best to disrupt trading on third-party platforms. Side activities run by the platform would be safe.