Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, may have lost half a billion dollars after a hack of its network.
The company temporarily suspended transactions and the transfer of funds after detecting an exploit between two blockchains, a method of digital theft that has been used recently in at least one other major hack.
“The issue is contained now. Your funds are safe. We apologize for the inconvenience and will provide further updates accordingly,” Binance’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao, said in a tweet.
Binance originally said that $100m to $110m in funds were taken. Since then, CNBC has reported the crypto company has lost $570m.
In a blogpost on Friday, Binance said it was working on locking down any areas of vulnerability. “First, we want to apologize to the community for the exploit that occurred. We own this,” the company wrote. “Thanks to the assistance of all the security experts, projects, and validators, the vast majority of the funds remain under control.”
Last year Binance said that it was time for global regulators to establish rules for crypto markets. The company acknowledged at the time that crypto platforms have an obligation to protect users and to implement processes to prevent financial crimes, along with the responsibility to work with regulators and policymakers to set standards to keep users safe.
Binance is just the latest crypto company to experience a targeted hack. In August Nomad, a service that allows users to send crypto tokens between different blockchains, was struck, with media reports saying it was taken for nearly $200m. Harmony, another transfer service, lost about $100m in a hack in June.
Associated Press contributed to this article

"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence... three times, it’s enemy action.” As European politicians and security agencies ponder the explosions in the Nord Stream pipelines they may find this adage of Ian Fleming’s helpful in resolving their doubts about who was responsible.
The strange thing about Putin’s assault on Ukraine was that he clearly hadn’t consulted Valery Gerasimov, the guy who in 2013 had radically reconfigured Russian military doctrine at his behest (and is now chief of the Russian armed forces). Gerasimov’s big idea was that warfare in a networked age should combine the traditional kinetic stuff with political, economic, informational, humanitarian and other non-military activities.
Putin’s invasion in February ran directly counter to this doctrine. Instead the assault was a 1940s-style blitzkrieg. And it hasn’t worked. So as he returns to the drawing board, it’s conceivable that the Russian leader has, finally, been talking to Gerasimov. If that’s the case, then their conversations will have rapidly turned to topics such as deniability, asymmetric warfare and identifying the critical weaknesses of their western adversaries.
Which in turn means that they will be thinking less about pipelines and much more about the undersea fibre-optic cables that now constitute the nervous system of our networked world. There are now about 475 of them and they carry more than 95% of all the data traffic on the global internet – $10tn money transfers and at least 15m financial transactions every day. The Telegeography site maintains a terrific up-to-date map of them all.
These cables are the critical infrastructure of the western world. They are funnelled into the sea via often poorly protected entry points on remote ocean coastlines. The cables mostly belong to a largish number of private companies, and so – up to now at least – have been largely neglected or ignored by governments.
Lying on the ocean floor, cables are obviously vulnerable to accidental damage. One industry source claims that only about 100 breaks a year are caused by fishing boats and trawlers. Until 2017 it seems that malicious attacks were rare. In that year there were two on transatlantic cables – UK to US and France to US – which were, er, under-reported at the time, but which may have been the trigger for a study written by none other than Rishi Sunak for the thinktank Policy Exchange, which concluded that the vulnerability of the undersea cable network was deeply troubling and that the danger of an attack on the system was “nothing short of existential”.
In his foreword to the report, Admiral James Stavridis, a former Nato supreme allied commander, pointed out that “Russian submarine forces have undertaken detailed monitoring and targeting activities in the vicinity of North Atlantic deep-sea cable infrastructure”. Which is interesting for two reasons. One is the conversations that are now doubtless going on in the Kremlin. The second is that Stavridis is the co-author of a fascinating thriller, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, in which the trigger for catastrophe comes when a Russian ship severs 30 undersea cables, thereby cutting the US off from the world. I doubt that President Putin has read it. But I bet General Gerasimov has.

I'm wondering if the employment/unemployment picture is becoming fragmented. There are many reports of large layoffs in businesses and financial operations which are large-scale operations. But, as Crash mentions, not so much in smaller local businesses, largely retail, restaurant, and other "service" type jobs.
I'm guessing that the overall employment picture may be more complex than is generally being reported. It may be that the reporting mechanisms were not designed to accurately reflect the situation that we have right now, and therefore don't give us sufficient granularity.

The economy is weakening, big companies from Ford to Facebook’s parent are cutting jobs or freezing hiring and inflation is eating into household budgets. Yet for many small-business owners, finding workers is as difficult as ever.
More than one-third of small businesses said hiring challenges had worsened in the three months ended Sept. 1, according to a Goldman Sachs survey of nearly 1,500 small-business owners. Forty-seven percent of them said finding and retaining qualified employees was the most significant problem small businesses faced, up from 43% in the survey released in June.
Nearly 60% of small companies report that worker shortages are affecting their ability to operate at full capacity, according to a September survey of more than 725 small-business owners.
Nearly 80% of small-business owners said they have increased wages and compensation in response to hiring challenges, according to the survey, and another 11% plan to do so. In addition, 60% of small businesses have refined their recruiting strategies, while 46% have boosted employee benefits.
Some small-business owners say they see the job market easing at the margins. William Duff Jr., founder and managing principal of William Duff Architects Inc. in San Francisco, said the firm is getting more applications for junior-level jobs that require six to seven years of experience or less. Senior architects are harder to find, he said. The 30-person firm, which struggled most of the year to fill job openings, handed out raises at the start of the year and again in the summer.
Boudreau Pipeline Corp., based in Corona, Calif., says it has turned down more than $13 million in work this year, roughly 22% of the amount it has been awarded, because it doesn’t have enough staff. The roughly 350-person company installs underground utilities, water, sewer and storm drains.
“It’s frustrating,” said the company’s president, Alan Boudreau, who figures he could easily employ 50 more people. The company has boosted wages by 22% over the past two years and added three in-house recruiters. It offers hiring bonuses of as much as $2,500 and retention bonuses of up to $5,000, provided workers stay at least one year. In early 2021, the company boosted referral bonuses to as much as $1,500, up from $150 four years ago. Referrals are the best source of new hires, Mr. Boudreau said.
In August, Vladimir Gendelman eliminated college-degree requirements from all job positions at his Company Folders Inc., a Pontiac, Mich., maker of custom presentation folders, binders and envelopes. He came up with the idea after promoting his executive-assistant to a job as print project manager, though she didn’t have any skills or training in printing, prepress or graphic design.
“We realized we don’t need an education,” he said. “We need somebody who is learning on their own, somebody who can figure things out.”

Would it grieve anyone here to think all of that past performance is meaningless and no guarantee of future results?