What happened

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, has confirmed the theft of roughly US$6.3 billion from its hot wallets, making it the biggest crypto heist on record. About US$3 billion has reportedly been frozen. Blockchain analysts and the FBI have attributed the attack to North Korean state-backed hackers.

Binance's early findings point to a single compromised DevOps engineer's laptop. From there, attackers reached a service container that submitted unauthorised withdrawals, with most of the damage done in a window of about 20 minutes.

Why it matters

One endpoint should never be able to move billions. This incident shows how a single privileged workstation, combined with standing access to production systems, can turn a routine compromise into a catastrophic loss.

How to protect your AWS environment

• Remove standing admin access and use just-in-time, time-limited elevation for production.
• Require separate, hardened devices or isolated sessions for privileged cloud work.
• Alert on unusual withdrawal, transfer or high-value API activity in real time, not in a morning report.

Source: Click to Read the original report (Associated Press)