BNB Chain faces $80K Bitcoin exploit. White hat hacker or ongoing exploit?

Certain on-chain signs point to a potential white hat, or ethical hacker, looking for blockchain vulnerabilities.

Approximately $80,000 worth of Bitcoin (BTC) was lost in a potential exploit on the BNB Chain involving multiple suspicious transactions.

While $80,000 is considered a small amount compared to the average crypto exploits, it raised questions about the attacker’s intentions.

While the exploited token contract is still unknown, the attacker could be a white hat hacker, or ethical hacker, who uses his skills to find security vulnerabilities, according to on-chain security firm Cyvers. The firm wrote in a May 28 X post:

“The total loss is approximately $80K. The attacker received funding via TornadoCash and has also interacted with the Binance exchange, indicating a possible white hat action.”

Cointelegraph has approached Cyvers for comment.

Despite receiving funding from the cryptocurrency mixing service Tornado Cash, the exploiter also interacted with Binance, the world’s largest centralized exchange.

Sophisticated crypto hackers with malicious intent avoid interacting with large centralized exchanges like Binance, which require Know Your Customer (KYC) verification and could lead to discovering the identity of malicious actors.

Related: Mt. Gox moves $9.6B worth of Bitcoin. Are creditors now being repaid?

Some hacks have a happy ending

The potential exploit comes a week after Gala Games was exploited for $23 million worth of Gala (GALA) tokens. According to Gala Games co-founder and CEO Eric Schiermeyer, the exploit occurred due to an issue with “internal controls,” which the team has since fixed.

In an unexpected turn of events, the hacker returned $22.3 million worth of Ether (ETH) — close to the market value of the 600 million GALA they stole and sold a day earlier — after the attacker’s wallet was frozen with the stolen funds.

The return of the funds came after Gala’s co-founder and CEO, Eric Schiermeyer, said in a May 20 X and Discord post that the alleged attacker had been identified, including “his home address.”

This is the second time in May that a thief has had a change of heart and returned stolen funds.

Earlier this month, $71 million worth of cryptocurrencies stolen from a recent wallet poisoning scam was been returned to the victim.

The unknown attacker returned the $71 million on May 12 after the high-profile phishing incident caught the attention of multiple blockchain investigation firms.

However, on-chain transactions suggest that the attacker wasn’t an ethical hacker but a malicious actor who got scared of the mainstream attention and decided to return the funds.