The exchange insisted “User funds are completely safe” and warned its customers “should remain cautious of scams and should not trust unofficial links, messages, or requests for account information.” The company soon froze $2.5 billion worth of assets and warned that the figure could go higher “as our teams work closely with law enforcement, issuers, blockchain intelligence firms and industry partners to trace and freeze extra assets.”
To prevent the matter worsening, Binance halted all trading, deposits, and withdrawals. It also promised to cover any losses.
About an hour ago at the time of writing, Binance posted an update on the incident that explains what it thinks went wrong. “Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions,” the post states.
