TraderTraitor: The Kings of the Crypto Heist
On February 21, the largest crypto heist ever started to unfold. Hackers gained control of a crypto wallet belonging to the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, Bybit, and stole almost $1.5 billion of digital tokens. They quickly shunted the money between dozens of cryptocurrency wallets and services to try and obscure the activity, before starting to cash the stolen funds out.
The eye-popping digital raid had all the hallmarks of being conducted by one of North Korea’s elite subgroups of hackers. While Bybit remained solvent by borrowing cryptocurrency and launched a bounty scheme to track down the stolen funds, the FBI quickly pinned the blame on the North Korean hackers known as TraderTraitor.
Before the Bybit heist,…
