Half the Record Crypto Theft Frozen as Investigators Close In
The exchange that lost $6.3bn this week says it has frozen about half the stolen funds and set aside more than that sum of its own money to cover customers. The US Secret Service says it is working around the clock to trace and recover the assets. The breach was wider than first disclosed.
Two things have changed since we reported the theft itself. The recovery is real and quantified — roughly $3bn of the $6.3bn secured, more than $6.34bn of company funds set aside, and the Secret Service pledging to “identify, freeze, trace, and recover” the money and bring those responsible to justice, with the FBI also involved. And the attack was bigger than the first account suggested: the co-chief executive now says it was “not carried out by one person”, that an initial theory of one compromised laptop gave way to “additional points of breach”, and that the intruders ran “a self-destruct mechanism that destroyed tooling and traces as they went”. Attribution stays hedged, as it should: one analysis firm reports “high confidence” of a North Korean link, another says elements merely “resembled” earlier incidents, and Pyongyang has always denied such claims. The reason it matters beyond crypto is that America, South Korea and Japan this week restated a ban on revenue reaching North Korea’s weapons programmes. Lawyers caution that a pledge to cover losses is not the same as a contractual right.