Binance, one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges will resume its deposit and withdrawal activities from May 13. Operations had been halted by news of bitcoin hacking that occurred a week ago. The company stated in a blog that they have updated various advanced security features to speed up recovery.
The Binance hacking
On May 7, the company lost 7,000 Bitcoin tokens from its platform amounting to $40 million. The official statement said that hackers were able to access the application programming interface (API) of the users and two-factor authentication codes.
Attacks affected hot wallets containing less than 2% of the Bitcoin Holdings. The company prompted the suspension of deposits and withdrawals, while trading continued.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao promised to refund all the loss to affected customers using the Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) funds . It consists of 10% of all the trading fee earned by Binance. It serves as a back-up option in protecting the users of the exchange in extreme cases such as this.
Measures to prevent another Binance hacking
The CEO also promised to take measures to prevent another hacking by modifying withdrawal validation areas, API, and 2FA, including improving its KYC procedures, user behavior analysis, and risk management.
On another blog post a few days following Binance hacking, Binance CEO wrote:
“We are making significant changes to the API, 2FA, and withdrawal validation areas, which was an area exploited by hackers during this incident. We are improving our risk management, user behaviour analysis, and KYC procedures. We are working on more innovative ways to fight phishing.”
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When asked about additional security, he added,
We also have a number of additional security measures being implemented not directly visible on the front end.We will be adding hardware device support, such as YubiKey and other devices, very soon. We will run an event and give away 1,000 YubiKeys as soon as that feature is implemented.We aim to fully resume deposits and withdrawals on Tuesday.
On the estimated timeline of the introduction of such features, his comment read,
The time will be communicated at a later stage, depending on how the testing goes. This upgrade will require a trading halt. We will update you again tomorrow. Our team is making progress and has been working through the weekend. In the past few days, we have made some significant overhauls to our system, with a large number of advanced security features added and/or completely re-architected. We will share details on some of the changes later.”