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Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao breaks down $570 million crypto hack

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance temporarily suspended its blockchain network after hackers made off with around $570 million worth of its BNB token.

Binance said late Thursday a cross-chain bridge linking with its BNB Chain was targeted, enabling hackers to move BNB tokens off the network. So-called cross-chain bridges are tools that allow the transfer of tokens from one blockchain to another.

The company said it had worked with network validators — entities or individuals who confirm transactions on the blockchain — to pause creation of new blocks on BSC, suspending all transaction processing while a team of developers investigates the breach.

Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume.

“An exploit on a cross-chain bridge, BSC Token Hub, resulted in extra BNB. We have asked all validators to temporarily suspend BSC,” Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s CEO, said in a tweet Thursday evening.

“The issue is contained now. Your funds are safe. We apologize for the inconvenience and will provide further updates accordingly.”

BNB Chain has since resumed operations.

Cracks are appearing in DeFi, crypto's 'Wild West'

In total, hackers drained 2 million BNB tokens — about $570 million at current prices — from the network, Binance’s BNB Chain said in a blog post on Friday.

The hack was caused by a bug in the bridge’s smart contract that allowed hackers to forge transactions and send money back to their crypto wallet, according to crypto security firm Immunefi. Smart contracts are pieces of code on the blockchain that allow agreements to execute automatically without human intervention.

“As with many bridge designs, there is one central point that holds most of the funds that are moving through the bridge,” Adrian Hetman, tech lead of the triaging team at Immunefi, told CNBC.

“Ultimately, the Bridge was tricked into giving funds from that contract.”

The value of BNB sank more than 3% Friday morning to $285.36 a coin, according to CoinMarketCap data.

An earlier estimate from the company placed the total amount withdrawn in a range of $100 million to $110 million. The company also said it managed to freeze $7 million of funds with the help of its security partners.

A Binance spokesperson told CNBC the company coordinated with BNB Chain validators to enact an upgrade. That meant that most of the funds remained in the exploiter’s crypto wallet, while about $100 million was “unrecovered.”

BNB Chain has 26 active validators at present and 44 in total in different time zones, the spokesperson added.

BNB Chain, originally known as Binance Chain, was first developed by Binance in 2019. Like other blockchains, it features a native token, called BNB, that can be traded or used in games and other applications.

It is the latest in a series of major hacks targeting cross-chain bridges, with instances of sloppy engineering making them a prime target for cybercriminals.

A total of around $1.4 billion has been lost to breaches on cross-chain bridges since the start of 2022, according to data from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.

The crypto industry has had a rough year, with roughly $2 trillion in value being erased since the peak of a blistering rally from 2020 to 2021. The implosion of $60 billion blockchain venture Terra and a worsening macroeconomic environment have severely impacted market sentiment.

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Microsoft announces new HR executive, company veteran Amy Coleman

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Microsoft announces new HR executive, company veteran Amy Coleman

Microsoft’s Amy Coleman (L) and Kathleen Hogan (R).

Source: Microsoft

Microsoft said Wednesday that company veteran Amy Coleman will become its new executive vice president and chief people officer, succeeding Kathleen Hogan, who has held the position for the past decade.

Hogan will remain an executive vice president but move to a newly established Office of Strategy and Transformation, which is an expansion of the office of the CEO. She will join Microsoft’s group of top executives, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella.

Coleman is stepping into a major role, given that Microsoft is among the largest employers in the U.S., with 228,000 total employees as of June 2024. She has worked at the company for more than 25 years over two stints, having first joined as a compensation manager in 1996.

Hogan will remain on the senior leadership team.

“Amy has led HR for our corporate functions across the company for the past six years, following various HR roles partnering across engineering, sales, marketing, and business development spanning 25 years,” Nadella wrote in a memo to employees.

“In that time, she has been a trusted advisor to both Kathleen and to me as she orchestrated many cross-company workstreams as we evolved our culture, improved our employee engagement model, established our employee relations team, and drove enterprise crisis response for our people,” he wrote.

Hogan arrived at Microsoft in 2003 after being a development manager at Oracle and a partner at McKinsey. Under Hogan, some of Microsoft’s human resources practices evolved. She has emphasized the importance of employees having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset, drawing on concepts from psychologist Carol Dweck.

“We came up with some big symbolic changes to show that we really were serious about driving culture change, from changing the performance-review system to changing our all-hands company meeting, to our monthly Q&A with the employees,” Hogan said in a 2019 interview with Business Insider.

Hogan pushed for managers to evaluate the inclusivity of employees and oversaw changes in the handling of internal sexual harassment cases.

Coleman had been Microsoft’s corporate vice president for human resources and corporate functions for the past four years. In that role, she was responsible for 200 HR workers and led the development of Microsoft’s hybrid work approach, as well as the HR aspect of the company’s Covid response, according to her LinkedIn profile.

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Google, Apple hit with EU antitrust actions under cloud of Trump tariff threats

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Google, Apple hit with EU antitrust actions under cloud of Trump tariff threats

A man holds an Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max ahead of the launch of sales of the new iPhone 16 series smartphones in a store in Moscow, Russia September 20, 2024. 

Evgenia Novozhenina | Reuters

European Union regulators are taking steps to rein in Google and Apple on antitrust charges, even as U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to hit the bloc with tariffs for alleged “overseas extortion” of America’s tech giants.

This breaking news story is being updated.

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XRP surges after Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says SEC is dropping its lawsuit against the company

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XRP surges after Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says SEC is dropping its lawsuit against the company

A visual representation of the digital cryptocurrency, XRP.

S3studio | Getty Images

XRP surged after Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the Securities and Exchange Commission is no longer pursuing its appeal in the case against the payments company.

The price of XRP was last higher by nearly 14% at $2.57.

“It’s been almost four years and about three months since the SEC originally sued us, certainly a painful journey in lots of ways,” Garlinghouse said at the Digital Assets Summit in New York Wednesday morning. “I really deeply believed that we were going to be on the right side of the law and on the right side of history.”

“The system just feels broken. That we had to fight this fight for the industry and you had an SEC attacking the industry, particularly the Ripple case,” he continued. “There were no victims, there was no investor loss. They were just not acting in good faith.”

In 2020, the SEC sued Ripple for breaching U.S. securities laws by selling XRP without first registering it with the agency. The company scored a partial victory in 2023 when SEC. U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres handed down the decision, which was hailed as a landmark win for the crypto industry. Still, while XRP at that point was not considered a security when sold to retail investors on exchanges, it was considered an unregistered security offering if sold to institutional investors.

The development comes as the SEC moves quickly to reverse much of the damage in the crypto industry left by the previous administration. Last month the agency ended its enforcement case against Coinbase; closed its investigations into Robinhood’s crypto unit, Uniswap, Gemini and Consensys with no enforcement action; scaled back its crypto enforcement unit; and clarified that meme coins are not securities.

This week, the newly formed SEC crypto task force will kick off a roundtable series focused on defining the security status of digital assets.

XRP was created by the founders of Ripple in 2012. It is the native token of the open source XRP Ledger, which Ripple uses in its cross-border payments business – about 95% of which takes place outside the U.S. Ripple is the largest holder of XRP coins.

The coin was the biggest beneficiary of the post-election Trump trade. It’s up more than 400% since then and up 22% this year.

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