BNB Chain reveals root cause of $13,000 X account hack

BNB Chain has discovered the root cause of the X account hack that resulted in losses worth $13,000. The team claims all users have been fully compensated.

In a recent post shared on X, the account declared that all users affected by the social media hack that occurred on October 1st have been fully compensated for their losses. The transfer was made by BNB Chain in the form of USDT.

The largest compensatory transfer was made to an address held by a user who lost $6,586, and the minimum transfer amount was valued at $1.13 in USDT (USDT). A total of 13 users were compensated for approximately $13,000 worth of lost funds after a hacker infiltrated the official account of X’s BNB (BNB) chain.

In addition to the latest information on user compensation, this account also took the opportunity to uncover the root cause of social media-based hacking based on internal investigations. According to the post, the hacked person gained control of the account through a phishing link.

The link was subsequently identified, contained, and removed, but the damage had already been done. Moving forward, the team pledges to take the necessary steps to ensure protection from similar threats. However, he did not disclose any efforts to track down the attackers or plans to recover the stolen funds.

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“Following the incident, the team has implemented additional security measures to prevent similar breaches and further strengthen account protection,” the BNB Chain team said in a recent post.

This announcement appears to have little impact on BNB prices. At the time of writing, the token has fallen from the $1,100 threshold and stabilized around $1,090. BNB fell by 1.7% in the past 24 hours, following a one-week decline of 3.29%.

What happened to the BNB Chain X account?

On October 1st, X’s official BNB Chain account was compromised by someone. As a result of this hack, accounts spammed their timelines with posts promoting fake BNB airdrop events. Each post contains a malicious link marked “bnbchain.org” that, when clicked, can compromise users’ wallets.

The hackers continued posting phishing links until around 6 a.m. UTC, when the post promoting the airdrop was no longer available.

At that time, many users started speculating about the safety of X accounts, thinking that the BNB chain was an account with a gold check mark and should be more resistant to hacking. Some users asked the BNB team to suspend their accounts and force them to log out of all authentication apps linked to their handles.

A few hours after the hack, the BNB Chain team announced that they had successfully regained control of the account and deleted the posts shared by the hacker. The team also promised to fully compensate users affected by the exploit.

After preliminary investigation, the team estimated that the attacker shared 10 phishing links, which caused a loss of $8,000 across all chains and $6,500 for one user.

In a separate move, the attackers exploited a phishing contract to deposit $17,800, fraudulently obtain $22,000 worth of meme tokens, and earn approximately $4,000 in profits. Combined with previous exploits, these transactions netted the hackers a total of approximately $13,000 in profits.

After the incident, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao highlighted the fact that the BNB community came together to pump the hacker’s meme coin, dubbed “4” after Ragpur. Users reportedly increased the value of the meme coin by 500% before devaluing it.

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