Bitcoin holdings of Binance attacker surpass Coinbase's company reserves
The cybercriminals behind the Binance breach possess 18,270 BTC, eclipsing Coinbase's company Bitcoin reserves, with their 508,621 ETH holdings also surpassing prominent Ethereum corporate treasuries.
The perpetrators responsible for the $6.3 billion Binance security breach possessed a larger Bitcoin reserve on Friday than the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase maintained for investment purposes and operational needs at the conclusion of September.
Bitquery, a blockchain analytics company, tracked down 18,270 Bitcoin (BTC), valued at approximately $1.4 billion, across 19 wallet addresses associated with the malicious actor.
According to Coinbase's disclosures, the company maintained 17,954 BTC designated for investment purposes and an additional 117 BTC allocated for operational use as of Sept. 30, totaling 18,071 BTC. The Bitcoin stash controlled by the Binance attacker surpassed this combined amount by 199 BTC. It's important to note that Coinbase's reported holdings exclude the BTC that the platform custodies on behalf of its customers.
Based on its 17,954 BTC investment portfolio, BitcoinTreasuries.net positions Coinbase at eighth place among publicly listed corporations ranked by their Bitcoin reserve holdings.
On Friday, Binance acknowledged that it had fallen victim to a $6.3 billion cyberattack and indicated that approximately $3 billion worth of compromised assets had been successfully frozen. The cryptocurrency exchange made a commitment to reimburse all losses incurred.
TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company, has linked the cyberattack to TraderTraitor, a hacking collective associated with North Korea. Binance revealed that security investigators had identified additional points of compromise after the investigation initially pointed toward a laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer that had been compromised.
Based on Bitquery's analysis, 17 of the wallets controlled by the attackers each contained 1,000 BTC, with the remainder of the stolen cryptocurrency distributed between two additional wallets. The stolen BTC originated from Binance hot wallet infrastructure during a security breach that impacted nine different blockchains within a four-hour timeframe on Thursday.
Additionally, Bitquery identified 508,621 Ether (ETH) linked to the cybercriminals based on the same Friday data snapshot, a quantity that surpasses the 495,362 ETH credited to The Ether Machine, which holds third position on BitcoinTreasuries.net's ranking of corporate Ethereum holders.
The perpetrators originally obtained 200,630 ETH through direct theft and amassed the remaining portion by exchanging stolen stablecoins along with other digital tokens, according to additional details provided by Bitquery.