Huobi & Binance team freezes HarmonyOne’ hacked funds

On Jan 16, 2023

Binance & Huobi Global security team seized some crypto assets, which were moving through the Huobi Global exchange.

Harmony is a Proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain network. And a trustless bridge called “Horizon bridge” on Harmony faced a hacking attack. Through the attack, hacker(s) drained approximately $100 million worth of crypto assets.

2/ We are also working alongside the FBI and several cybersecurity firms.

Our engineers are narrowing down the attack vectors since the start of our investigation. We have also implemented enhanced security measures and suspended our Horizon bridge.
— stephen tse 💙 s.1 🌉 stse.eth (@stse) June 25, 2022

On 16 Jan 2023, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), CEO & founder of Binance exchange, informed the Crypto community that a Harmony hacker was trying to launder the funds through Huobi Global Crypto exchange.

Binance’s security team detected this fund movement on Huobi and informed the Huobi team about this thing. Huobi seized the account, through which the hacker was trying to launder the funds.

We detected Harmony One hacker fund movement. They previously tried to launder through Binance and we froze his accounts. This time he used Huobi. We assisted Huobi team to freeze his accounts. Together, 124 BTC have been recovered. CeFi helping to keep DeFi #SAFU! 🙏
— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) January 16, 2023

Earlier this, this hacker tried to launder the stolen funds through the Binance exchange but Binance froze the account. And now in total 124 Bitcoins have been recovered.

Binance’s CEO also talked about the problem with other exchanges. He said that not every crypto exchange is friendly in the crypto sector because they think of each other as rival companies and this is the reason why they don’t remain in better relationships to fight against such bad actors.

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Our security teams talk to each other, not all exchanges are collaborative (some have a wrong competitive mindset), but many are. I am actually not in those chats myself. Don't know the details.
— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) January 16, 2023

Justin Sun, Tron founder & anonymous owner of Huobi Global, also shared this news with followers.

We're proud to announce that thanks to our dedicated team and collaboration with @binance, we were able to detect and prevent a Harmony One hacker from attempting to launder funds through @HuobiGlobal. ❤️
— H.E. Justin Sun🌞🇬🇩🇩🇲🔥₮ (@justinsuntron) January 16, 2023

Crypto & Hack attacks

In the last few years, the decentralized finance (Defi) concept based on many decentralised Crypto exchanges emerged as a new option for Crypto investors to deal with crypto assets investment with full anonymity.

The security level of these Defi protocols is still far from 100% security perfectness level, which makes it very easy for hackers to steal funds.

Since the beginning, Crypto critics have always criticised cryptocurrencies over their decentralised nature which helps money laundering. If all the Crypto exchanges can work with each other with a collaborative approach, then it will surely help this innovative sector to get out from the tags of Crypto money laundering, and also it will degrade the confidence of hackers.