The largest theft in history: DPRK behind the $6.4B Binance hack | Hacker News Reader

The largest theft in history: DPRK behind the $6.4B Binance hack

elliptic.co

4 pointscpncrunch5 comments

At approximately 20:05 UTC on 29 October, five Binance wallets on the XRP Ledger sent 233 million XRP to a single attacker-controlled address. Over the next 30 minutes, Binance hot wallets on Solana, NEAR, Base, Optimism, Bitcoin, Tron, Ethereum, Arbitrum and Avalanche were also drained. A second wave of withdrawals hit Binance wallets on Avalanche and Polygon shortly after 23:00 UTC.

The largest losses were on Ethereum, where $3.80 billion was taken across 186 different tokens, including 1.9 billion USDT and 823 million USDC. The attacker also stole 18,270 BTC, worth $1.48 billion, and 612.7 million USDT on Tron. Binance has suspended deposits and withdrawals, and has said that it will cover all losses using its SAFU fund and company funds.

Couldn't all of this been filtered for in real time ?

Probability distributions, ML classifiers, graph theoretic algorithms, etc. all seem to be useful for detecting these types of events in real time ?

Not being familiar with the crypto networks algorithms in detail enough to know, I'm spitballing this here.

Also:

On Ethereum, the attacker abused EIP-7702, a feature introduced in the 2025 Pectra upgrade that allows a regular wallet to delegate its behaviour to a smart contract.

So it sounds like a combination of factors and lack of safeguards led to this happening.

Ah ha, the unforeseen consequences of the latest and greatest patch.

'This is almost certainly the largest theft of any kind in history.'

Not even close: How Britain stole $45 trillion from India ($60.4T adjusted for inflation)

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/12/19/how-britain-st...

Here’s how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third) to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.

It was a scam – theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat.

Isn't this how US government procurement works ?

Isn't this how any government procurement works ?

Taxation is theft, but its for your own good.

Isn't this how governments work ?

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