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How North Korea pulled off a $1.5 billion crypto heist—the biggest in history
Attack on Bybit didn’t hack infrastructure or exploit smart contract code. So how did it work?
The cryptocurrency industry and those responsible for securing it are still in shock following Friday’s heist, likely by North Korea, that drained $1.5 billion from Dubai-based exchange Bybit, making the theft by far the biggest ever in digital asset history. It’s still unclear how the attackers managed to hack the UIs of multiple Bybit employees whose signatures were required for the funds to be moved out of cold storage, but as researchers Dan Guido, Benjamin Samuels, and Anish Naik of security firm Trail of Bits noted, hackers working on behalf of the North Korean government have long deployed sophisticated malware tools that: That persistence likely allowed the thieves who hit Bybit to somehow tamper with the UIs of each company employee whose digital imprimatur was required to move the funds out of cold storage—and ultimately into wallets the hackers controlled—all at breakneck speed.
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