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Binance revealed on Tuesday that one of its employees, deceived by hackers with a fake job interview, downloaded malware that facilitated the theft of more than $6 billion in cryptocurrency from its platform, considered the biggest heist in the history of this sector.
The platform stated that it has already reimbursed 98% of the stolen assets using its own funds. The remaining 2% were in cryptocurrencies that are more difficult to acquire due to their scarcity.
According to the company, the hackers took their first step in June, four months before the theft.
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The hackers managed to get a platform engineer to download a version of a well-known programming tool in the sector (Homebrew) that contained a virus.
Although the company's cybersecurity teams detected the virus and removed it, the hackers obtained the data of the engineer who downloaded the virus and that of other colleagues on the platform.
In September, they approached another Binance engineer through a job platform, offering them an interview and tricking them into downloading malware with "sophisticated techniques," the platform said.
This malware was key to the success of the hack and allowed the cyberattackers to establish a connection with the platform's internal systems.
On October 20, the attackers used the access they had obtained and an internal AI tool to take control of the software used by two other engineers.
Nine days later, they activated the malicious code that set the attack in motion, which, according to the FBI, is linked to North Korean authorities.
Pyongyang, through the sister of leader Kim Jong Un, labeled this accusation as "absurd rhetoric."
Of the stolen funds, some $2.85 billion were frozen, according to Binance, which means the attackers would not be able to use that sum to exchange it for other currencies.
Binance is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange platform by daily trading volume. News of the cyberattack caused the prices of most of these coins to fall abruptly.
[Publicidad]