-Official- Binance Helps Take Down Cybercriminal Ring Laundering $500M in Ransomware Attacks

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Binance For The Win

Big. I mean Bigly. Bigly Huge news!!

Why is the Binance’s blog announcement a big and I mean big deal?

Bianance has a long and stellar reputation of integrity, infrastructure that’s scalable, serious operational security, and when it comes to cyber security, conservatively speaking I’d rate Bianance in the top 10% of cryptocurrency vendors, exchanges (which are increasingly problematic) . Bianance “is the world’s leading blockchain and cryptocurrency infrastructure provider with a financial product suite that includes the largest digital asset exchange by volume”

Speaking globally Bianance has steadily grown its customer base. Their customers trust Bianance and their performance and proactive security measures.. Binance’s platform is geared towards what their customers want and need and sometimes their customers didn’t even know they needed or wanted a product, until they did. Below are a few examples…and no I’m not paid to extols this company, admittedly I am a customer, but a small customer.

• unmatched portfolio of crypto products and offerings, including:

• trading and finance, education,

• data and research,

• social good, investment and incubation,

• decentralization and infrastructure solutions,

2020 Binance Exchange Milestones

• $15 billion in 24-hour all-time-high spot trading (up by 5 billion compared to 2019)

• $3.88 billion average daily trading volume (up by 36%)

• 184 tokens listed on Binance (up from 151)

• 591 trading pairs on Binance (up from 396)

• 7,000,000 USDT in recovered funds by Binance Customer Service for 3,109 users this year. (Total funds recovered since 2017 is 15,000,000 USDT)

• 26 languages featured on the Binance website (up from 16)

• 11 languages supported by Binance Customer Service

2020 -Crypto-Financial Services Milestones;

• $2,900,000,000 worth of crypto assets currently on Binance Earn

• $70,850,000 worth of total rewards distributed on Binance Earn

• 210,000+ daily active users of Binance Earn

• 3rd: current ranking of Binance Pool in global mining, just nine months after launch.

• 2.5% and 0.5% mining fees for BTC and ETH respectively on Binance Pool, the lowest in the crypto mining industry.

• $700,000,000 in volume generated via the Binance OTC Portal

• 46% growth in institutional client base this year

Binance Ecosystem as of December 2020

Data source Bianance 2020 Milestones

To give you a general idea of the kind of research and product incubation Binance does (which is truly without equal) - 2021 - Global Crypto User Index

“A global survey report on crypto user motivations, behaviors and preferences”

Binance Helps Take Down Cybercriminal Ring Laundering $500M in Ransomware Attacks…

More recently Binance Security has been taking part in an international investigation with Ukraine Cyber Police, Cyber Bureau of Korean National Police Agency, US Law Enforcement, Spanish Civil Guard, and Swiss Federal Office of Police, among others, in apprehending a prolific cybercriminal ring.

The group -- also known as FANCYCAT -- has been running multiple criminal activities: distributing cyber attacks; operating a high-risk exchanger; and laundering money from dark web operations and high-profile cyber attacks such as Cl0p and Petya ransomware. In all, FANCYCAT is responsible for over $500M worth of damages in connection with ransomware and millions more from other cybercrimes.

Binance to cyber criminals: take your dirty (illicit) cryptocurrency elsewhere

…biggest security problem in the industry today is money connected to cyber attacks being laundered through nested services and parasite exchanger accounts that live inside macro VASPs, including exchanges like Binance.com. These criminals enjoy taking advantage of reputable exchanges’ liquidity, diverse digital asset offerings and well-developed APIs. 

Exchanges are Middlemen —Criminals use Exchanges to launder their illicit (dirty) largesse

In a majority of the cases associated with illicit blockchain flows coming onto exchanges, the exchange is not harboring the actual criminal group themselves, but rather being used as a middleman to launder stolen profits. Figure 1 shows an example of the money laundering process on an exchange in relation to cyber attacks:

A-M-L + data analytics =Cl0p and Petya

Well that certainly was not on my bingo card —the Petya thread that Bianance’s security team identified. But linking the Cl0p group and Petya Group is like a present from the cyber gods…

Biannce applied the two-pronged approach to the FANCYCAT investigation: our AML detection and analytics program detected suspicious activity on Binance.com and expanded the suspect cluster. Once we mapped out the complete suspect network, we worked with private sector chain analytics companies TRM Labs and Crystal (BitFury) to analyze on-chain activity and gain a better understanding of this group and its attribution. Based on our analysis we found that this specific group was not only associated with laundering Cl0p attack funds, but also with Petya and other illegally-sourced funds.
This led to the identification and eventual arrest of FANCYCAT. 

…We are continuing to investigate the FANCYCAT criminal syndicate across multiple jurisdictions and the connections associated with other cyber attacks…

To understand the FANCYCAT Operation - then you might want to read last week’s Cl0p-Takedown — and then let’s not forget FANCYCAT leaked confirmation info on the dark web on or about June 21, 2021, per Vice News - so clearly last week’s arrest somewhat confirms (note my sarcasm) there are still some cl0p members at large.

Making the International Crypto Ecosystem a Safer Place

When you are an industry leader this type of constant proactive forward thinking actually goes a long way… or at least it should

…we believe that strong controls across exchanges, smart legislation and ongoing education will help immensely with weeding out bad actors. Projects such as our “Bulletproof Exchanger” and our ongoing partnerships with law enforcement, as well as security and blockchain analytics firms, will be a driving force in improving the cybersecurity measures across the wider crypto industry.

On June 7, 2021 I walked you through the DOJ partial clawback of the ransom Colonial Pipeline. Just a few days latter on June 9, 2021 I tried to explain why “targeting the entire ecosystem” was absolutely critical to knock down the every growing ransom-exploitation attacks.

Like I said Binance’s Blog announcement is actually a really big deal. And this could very well be a serious game changer for cyber criminals and law enforcement a like.
-Filey