Supervisors at the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reached out to banks at the beginning of the week to inquire about unusual activity or service disruptions, the report said.
One of the banks said there were no disruptions to its service, per the report. The bank’s employees had prepared talking points for customers, but they had received few questions related to the heist.
Meanwhile, a separate report Thursday from Bloomberg News cited findings from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis showing that the hackers behind the Binance theft are moving some of the stolen funds through Chinese money-laundering networks.
The hackers, allegedly members of North Korea’s TraderTraitor group, have been seen funneling stolen assets through thousands of digital wallets and across multiple blockchains in an effort to mask their origins, the report said. Chainalysis said that it has tracked hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Binance theft, a sliver of the total stolen, moving into the Chinese networks.
Elsewhere, banks have been studying the $6.3 billion Binance hack, thought to be the largest financial heist ever recorded, and are performing diagnostics to make sure they are ready to fend off similar attacks, according to the Reuters report.
Within hours of the hack, cybersecurity workers at one of the biggest U.S. banks reached out to their counterparts at Binance, the report said. That team is at work on an internal report that will lead to a review of the bank’s system and potentially upgraded cybersecurity. It is unclear if the bank would be vulnerable to similar tactics employed by the Binance hackers.
Binance said it was not aware of conversations between banks and regulators, and whether the heist had affected U.S. lenders, according to the report.
“We are in close contact with regulators all over the world, keeping them up to date on this security breach,” a Binance spokesperson said, per the report.
The key concern is the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence models, which has made it tough for banks to stay ahead of cybercrime, the report said. Banks are focusing resources on reviewing and patching cybersecurity codes.
The Binance hack came as digital asset infrastructure “is moving closer to the traditional financial system by the day,” PYMNTS reported Tuesday (Nov. 3), citing the example of Kraken’s limited purpose account with access to the U.S. Federal Reserve System.
“Crypto transactions are often described as traceable because public blockchains maintain permanent transaction records,” the report said. “However, visibility into transactions is not equivalent to identifying the people controlling the funds, much less recovering them. Once stolen assets are divided among wallets, exchanged into other tokens and transferred across blockchain networks, investigators must reconstruct an expanding web of transactions.”
