6 billion in 20 minutes: why crypto exchanges are a favoured target
Hackers are believed to have stolen around 6 billion US dollars from Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. State-backed attackers from North Korea are suspected. On “Update Wirtschaft”, Mirko Ross, founder and CEO of asvin, talks about the case and what follows from it.
He is not surprised that a crypto exchange was attacked. Only last year, 1.5 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen from another exchange.
What is new is the scale:
“In gold, that would have been 22 to 23 lorry loads. With cryptocurrency, it happens within 20 minutes.”
Even so, an attack like this is not easy. The perpetrators have been targeting crypto exchanges for years and operate at a highly professional level. But Binance shows that it can be done. That is why the question now is whether the security measures there were sufficient.
Following the money
Every transaction is recorded in the ledger, the transaction book, and can be traced. This made it possible to freeze around 3 billion. The rest is much harder. Specialised service providers split the sums into small parts and exchange them into many other cryptocurrencies. The same structures exist in ransomware extortion. “It can be traced, but it takes an enormous amount of effort.”
AI on both sides
On top of this come attacks on refrigeration systems. Mirko Ross describes the past four to eight weeks as a very tense period, with security firms working around the clock. The reason is artificial intelligence: attackers use AI to find vulnerabilities and exploit them.
His answer is AI on the defensive side as well. Europe is lagging behind here, because regulation slows things down and powerful frontier models from the US are not available in Europe.
Watch the full interview in the ARD Mediathek:
Konrad Buck
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