North Korean cryptocurrency thieves tricked a Binance software engineer into downloading malware onto their work-issued computer during a fake job interview process before last week’s record-breaking $6.3 billion heist.
In an incident report published on Tuesday, the cryptocurrency exchange said several techniques - including social engineering via fake job interviews, malware downloads, compromised internal AI tooling, endpoint takeover, and an “advanced transaction-authorization method” - led to the October 29 security breach.
“Our current investigation indicates that this was a sophisticated, multi-stage campaign,” the incident report said. “It was not a single isolated breach or a simple phishing incident.”
Over the weekend, the FBI attributed the theft to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking operation linked to Lazarus Group, known for combining espionage with massive cryptocurrency heists. The Pyongyang-backed crew is also highly adept at job market scams - both posing as IT workers, who are then hired by Western companies, and as potential employers to lure software engineers into downloading malware and infecting corporate devices.
So many reasons. The company is American and it is holding value for Americans, so it’s beholden to the SEC and a thousand compliance laws in the US.
Crypto as you know it is anonymous, but exchanges to operate in the US have so much scrutiny and compliance. They’ve had Id verification for years.
So in this case yes, it was the largest heist on currency in history, and a massive chunk was Americans’. I’d be shocked if they didn’t investigate.
Not to mention if it’s happening with crypto, it’s happening g with standard banks too. Not investigating would leave everyone else vulnerable to it.
Yeah not to mention the founder of Binance already went to prison for fraud and then was pardoned by Trump, so there’s that
What happened to be your own bank? I thought having your bitcoin transactions being irreversible was a feature.
Only dirty fiat currency and banks let you reverse transactions or retrieve stolen dollars.
It is. Only idiots leave their crypto on an exchange.
Exchanges are a lot like public toilets. You should go in, do your business, and get the fuck out. But a lot of people decide that they like the public toilet, and they’ll just stick around and chat about the weather.
How is there supposed to be any market depth if traders can’t leave open orders on exchanges?
That’s what market makers are for. Average joe/jill don’t have open orders on the exchanges. They just have their crypto that they purchased sitting on their exchange account.