In February, hackers made headlines when about $1.5 billion worth of digital assets were stolen from a cryptocurrency exchange. The sum, eye watering by any measure, could be the biggest theft in history.
You might think a breach of this magnitude, which roiled crypto markets, had to involve some groundbreaking illicit technology or a bad actor on the inside. And yet, the New York Times reveals, the hack was relatively straightforward, identifying and targeting a glaring vulnerability in the exchange’s security. It turned out that the exchange was still using free third-party storage software, which lacked sufficiently robust security protocols to enable to the exchange to properly verify transactions.
