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.
Why is the FBI investigating? Bitcoin is deliberately untraceable (ish), private (ish), tax free currency, free from meddlesome government regulation and intererence. So why should tax funded law enfrcement for any country expend reaources investigating bitcoin related theft? These billionaires are all libertarians until they get fucked by hostile state actors and then it’s big government to the rescue.
Bitcoin is far from untraceable. In fact, it’s one of the most traceable currencies that’s ever existed.
After all, you can see exactly what address sent exactly what amount to exactly what other address. All you have to do is compromise the addresses and then you know the people. And KYC from Exchanges does an incredibly good job at that.
ish. North Korea is still denying the hack, and I don’t think any of us can really prove it.
That’s because to do so, you really need subpoena power. If you are a nation state, you have the power to subpoena the exchanges and force them to give up information that they otherwise would not.
What do you mean by deliberately untraceable? It’s built upon a block chain ledger that tracks all transactions. I’m more amazed by those that are able to avoid tracing with this currency.
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.
Crime is crime.