On-chain investigators uncovered three rehearsal wallets and malicious Ethereum code that enabled billions in suspicious transfers across 10 blockchains.
The Binance attacker spent at least 36 hours preparing for the $6.36 billion crypto exchange hack that began with $296 million in XRP.
According to an Oct. 29 investigation by TRM Labs, the attacker began preparing the operation on Oct. 28 before executing coordinated transfers across 10 blockchains the following evening.
The blockchain intelligence firm found that most of the funds left Binance-linked wallets within approximately 20 minutes, making the incident the largest cryptocurrency theft on record.
TRM traced the earliest preparations to the morning of Oct. 28, when an attacker-controlled wallet received three small transfers from Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixing service.
Early the following day, the attacker deployed malicious smart-contract code and tested it against two newly created Ethereum wallets.
The attacker subsequently deployed a revised version and rehearsed the operation on a third wallet, successfully transferring test funds before returning them.
Between 20:05 and 20:09 UTC, five Binance wallets on the XRP Ledger transferred approximately 233.46 million XRP, valued at $296 million, into a single attacker-controlled address.
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“This was actually the canary in the coal mine as the Ripple hack [sic] apparently started 10 mins before all the other chains.”
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