Binance confirms $40 mln worth of Bitcoin stolen by hackers

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More than 40 million U.S. dollars' worth of Bitcoin has been stolen by hackers who broke into Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency platform by volume, its CEO Zhao Changpeng confirmed Wednesday.

In a statement published on Binance's website, Zhao confirmed "We have discovered a large-scale security breach," with hackers using "a variety of techniques, including phishing, viruses and other attacks."

Binance was founded in Shanghai in 2017, and has been the world's biggest exchange platform in terms of trading volume since early 2018.

A total of 7,000 Bitcoins were taken by the hackers, who "had the patience to wait, and execute well-orchestrated actions through multiple seemingly independent accounts at the most opportune time," according to Zhao.

One Bitcoin is currently worth around 5,815 U.S. dollars, making this one of the biggest and most serious breaches of a cryptocurrency exchange in recent years.

Despite the theft, Zhao promised that users would not lose any of their funds, with the lost Bitcoins to be covered by Binance's Secure Asset Fund for Users, a mechanism set up last year to protect users.

The Binance CEO promised users there would be "a thorough security review," after conceding there "may also be additional affected accounts that have not been identified yet."

Despite an 80-percent surge in Bitcoin since December, prices are still far behind the highs of 2017, which saw one Bitcoin worth close to 20,000 U.S. dollars.

Various hacks and security breaches have highlighted the risks associated with cryptocurrencies.

Last year, 60 million U.S. dollars' worth of Bitcoin was stolen from Japanese exchange Zaif, months after January's Coincheck theft, which saw a record 530 million U.S. dollars' worth of cryptocurrencies stolen.

Police in northwest China's Shaanxi Province last August uncovered a 600-million-yuan (87-million-U.S.-dollar) cryptocurrency hack attack, the largest such theft on record in the country.