$1.5B Bybit Hack – How the biggest hack in history happened | Hacker News Reader

$1.5B Bybit Hack – How the biggest hack in history happened

harrydonnelly.substack.com

57 pointsGowtham_HN17 comments

The narrative that this is a Lazarus Group hack is being pushed hard. The only connection is that the same wallet was used as in the Phemex hack, which is only speculated to have been done by the Lazarus Group. Bybit is stationed in Dubai, but it's a Singaporean company, just like Phemex. Observing crypto from afar, it's so baffling how people just accept these supposed hacks, and nothing ever comes out of it.

Right. In current environment it would certainly behoove any other attacker to associate themselves with assumed DPRK entities. Why not take inspiration of their laundering patterns and "donate" some fraction of the bounty to their wallets as cover?

Pinning things on Lazarus is in interest of US agencies, the victim themselves, and industry media.

Crypto bros are the perfect victims. Nobody likes them.

Crypto bros: Invest in Crypto because it's not under government control.

Also crypto bros: Government help, hackers stole my crypto.

because "being fucked with no recourse" is a key feature of cryptocurrencies

Always the same lousy explanations. Right before FTX went under, they were investors in the Switchboard oracle who was only utilizing pricing data from FTX & potentially one other exchange in the $112 million Mango Markets hack. When are people going to stop accepting North Korea stole your money, we're innocent?

> When are people going to stop accepting North Korea stole your money, we're innocent?

What are you suggesting here? Can you elaborate?

It’s easier to steal your own customers’ money than for someone to break in.

I don’t know if it’s exactly Occam’s Razor that “hacks” would originate from within the institutions compromised, but in crypto world the incentives are nuts and the ability to obfuscate bad behavior is extreme.

Crypto is still in the “bank heist” era.

The tech needs surrounding infrastructure built (or plugged in) - not technical but physical. Stuff like recourse mechanisms for mistakes; courts; and prisons.

Once that’s done it’ll end up almost indistinguishable from what we already have.

It goes against what it was supposed to be, but at this point it would be better off all stored in a cold custodial like the fed or banks, and then we could just trade synthetic shares on a reputable exchange. Decentralized isn’t the feature most people are interested in.

The time a dozen crypto apps is baffling to me why anyone would trust them with their money.

If we are lucky, in 30 years we will have reinvented the stock exchanges of the 1950s!

I can’t remember who first said it, but watching crypto evolve is like speedrunning why 150yr of securities laws, practices, and regulations exist.

Counterparty risk (including custodianship) is monstrous in crypto. It’s sort of amusingly ridiculous in the same way most tech trends that are trying to break the status quo stumble into the reasons certain rules and regulations exist.

there is some truth in that, but only some.. The adage that the media forms the message could hardly be more apt here. In the days of world sailing trade ships and financial arrangements, so many parts of the mechanisms were starkly different. The weaknesses and anti-patterns in the trade practice are very different then and now. right? Digital ledgers with public verification enable different weaknesses and anti-patterns, from the start.

Ha ha good luck enforcing a court judgment in North Korea. There's never going to be a working recourse mechanism for cryptocurrency in general. There's barely even a working recourse mechanism for international wire transfers of real fiat currency.

> Stuff like recourse mechanisms for mistakes; courts; and prisons.

> Once that’s done it’ll end up almost indistinguishable from what we already have.

Wild thing is that since it is all digital, it allows rogue state actors to be the ones pulling the heists (not exactly saying that is what happened here). So it seems very unlikely there will be actual recourse mechanisms outside of what is already happening (embargos, trade bans, etc), at least anytime in the near future. This isn't as simple as creating some laws and enforcing them, this requires global diplomacy/compliance which is a much taller order.

It was designed to explicitly avoid recourse. What you want is the traditional banking system, with COBOL and oversight.

It was originally supposed to be a replacement for cash. A digital medium of exchange.

The problem is that it has become for speculation and for banking. It is not suited to be this.

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