earned" a third of GDP. How hackers from North Korea stole $6 billion from Binance.
In four hours, hackers withdrew about $6.3 billion from the world's largest crypto exchange Binance. This is the largest cryptocurrency heist in history, nearly doubling the scale of the previous record.
The most interesting thing is that to Binance's systems, the suspicious transfers looked like normal transactions that the exchange itself allows. According to the previous version, hackers could penetrate the internal infrastructure through a hacked laptop of one of the engineers, and then use the transaction confirmation mechanisms.
Almost immediately after the attack was discovered, Binance stopped withdrawing funds, and cryptocurrency companies began blocking the stolen assets. About 2.7 billion dollars were frozen or transferred to protected addresses. However, an additional $3.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency remains in the control of criminals. The stock exchange promised to compensate the losses with its money.
Analysts link the hack to the hacker group Traderbogd, which was previously suspected of stealing 1.5 billion dollars from the Bybit exchange. To give you an idea of the scale, the sum of the Binance attack is more than a third of North Korea's estimated annual GDP.
How hackers managed to bypass the protection of the largest crypto exchange in the world, why it is no longer possible to freeze some of the billions and how the stolen cryptocurrency can finance the North Korean regime - read in the article of the EP.