Following the Binance Smart Chain Hack, which involved the theft of 2 million BNB worth about $100 million, the management and development team of Binance has sprung into action, putting several measures in place to ensure that something like that doesn’t happen again.
The Hack Aftermath
In a discussion about the $100 million hack on the Binance Smart Chain, Patrick Hillman, the Chief Communications Officer (CCO) of Binance, mentioned that the attack on the chain could have a much worse outcome.
According to Hillman, if the BSC validators hadn’t stepped in, the $100 million hack might have been a $570 million hack. Hillman also mentions that the communities that continue to rally around these bridges that are being exploited are getting much better at shutting them down quickly, updating their systems, and preventing worst-case scenarios before they happen.
If the BNB validators around the BSC bridge hadn’t noticed the unusual activity and quickly concluded that it was being exploited to mint more BNB tokens, the outcome would have been much worse.
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Hillman compared what happened to a group of thieves walking into the Federal Reserve, printing their own money, and walking right out with it.
In total, shutting down the attack before it became worse took about 26 BNB validators immediately swinging into action.
BNB Mitigates Further Occurrences
After the attack, Binance decided to undergo a hard fork on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
This hard fork will serve as a way to mitigate the cross-chain bridges and other infrastructure between the Beacon chain and the Smart chain, re-enabling cross-chain communication between the two.
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This new hard fork will be released on both the Binance testnet and mainnet. Binance has commented that the hard fork is only a “temporary urgent patch.”
The hard fork has been nicknamed “Moran” and is scheduled to go live at a block height of 22,107,423
The primary focus of the hard fork will be to fix the iavl hash check. And just like the hard fork on Ethereum that happened in mid-September, the fork doesn’t affect regular users.
However, the node operators may have to follow certain steps, including stopping all running nodes and replacing them with a new binary.
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This hard fork will permanently diverge from the blockchain’s former version, causing the nodes that fail to meet the fork requirements to run on a separate path from the new and improved Binance Smart chain.
The likelihood of a $100 million exploit happening again will be closer to zero.
