Binance: "Company Funds Used to Cover 90% of Compromised Assets"

[Anchor]

The full picture of a massive cryptocurrency exchange hacking incident, suspected to have been carried out by North Korea, is gradually coming to light. The hackers meticulously prepared by conducting rehearsals at least 36 hours in advance, and it was analyzed that the company was completely unaware of it. Binance stated that it has covered 90 percent of the compromised assets with company funds so far.

Reporter Lee Se-hyeon has the details.

[Reporter]

Just one day after suffering the largest hacking attack in history, cryptocurrency exchange Binance acknowledged its shortcomings.

[Yi He / Binance Co-CEO: There are many areas where we fell short. We should have invested more and earlier in security and established stricter standards.]

The total amount of damage identified so far reaches 8.4 trillion won in South Korean currency.

Security firm TRM Labs analyzed that the hackers conducted rehearsals to prepare for the attack at least 36 hours in advance.

However, Binance was reportedly completely unaware of these movements and had no choice but to watch as the funds were drained.

Another security firm, Chainalysis, detected circumstances indicating that the hackers were mixing the stolen funds in real time with the hacked funds from Bitget.

Cryptocurrency exchange Bitget also suffered a 500 billion won hack in a similar manner to this incident, and it has likewise been pointed to as the work of North Korea.

As the absolute top company, which accounts for 40 percent of the market, collapsed powerlessly, experts point out that South Korean exchanges cannot rest easy either.

[Yeom Heung-yeol / Professor Emeritus, Department of Information Security, Soonchunhyang University: If a top-tier cryptocurrency exchange is hacked and virtual assets are illegally stolen, we cannot rule out the possibility that identical incidents could occur anywhere in the world....]

Binance stated that it has used company funds to preemptively cover 90 percent of the cryptocurrency stolen in the hack and plans to cover the remaining 10 percent soon.

Binance's deposit and withdrawal services are scheduled to resume today (November 1) as planned.

(Video by Cho Chang-hyun | Video Editing by Kim Jin-won | Design by Cho Soo-in)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.