This article explains how and what happened in relation to the Viacoin pump on Binance.
First of all, Binance isn’t compromised or hacked. So, what did actually happen? Someone was able to hack a widely used trading bot and act on the owner’s behalf because the bot is authorized to buy/sell (the bot has the API keys).
The hacker managed to sell all the altcoins the accounts owned for Bitcoins. Next, he bought Viacoin with all these Bitcoins. He managed to create a pump for Viacoin where the price increased from approximately 0.0002532 till 0.025 (10,000% increase).
Source: www.giphy.com Why?The hacker had probably accumulated Viacoin over the last few weeks and placed high sell orders. In addition, Viacoin has a very low liquidity with just over 11 BTC worth of Viacoin being traded over the past 24 hours. Why choosing a coin which such a low liquidity? This allowed the hacker to easily clear the order book in order to fulfill his remaining high sell orders.
Mr Hacker, you’ve been a naughty clever boy!
The hacker probably choose for this route as trading bots usually don’t have the permission to withdraw money. At last, a trading bot that is allowed to trade on your behalf using the API keys bypasses two-factor authentication. Because of this, we can with 100% certainty conclude that Binance isn’t the one that’s been hacked, instead, a widely used bot has been hacked.
Source: www.tenor.com
This hack has probably indirectly affected the price of Bitcoin as the price slid below $10,000 and assets wiped out 20% of prices as Binance hack rumors surfaced. The rumors started when Reddit users started reporting about missing coins or coins being traded without their permission.
