WirecompaniesDextape brief
North Korea used LinkedIn, fake job interviews to trick Binance engineer in $6.3 billion hack
The hackers posed as recruiters, convincing a Binance employee to download a fake assignment as part of a broader and sophisticated campaign.
Dextape brief
Binance said Tuesday that North Korean hackers combined social engineering with malicious software to carry out last week's heist of about $6.3 billion. Executives said an engineer was approached on LinkedIn, put through fake job interviews, and then persuaded to open a file described as an assignment that gave intruders access to internal systems. A second employee was lured by an online ad to a tampered copy of the Homebrew software. Binance removed it, but the attackers had already learned who managed company wallets, and used that knowledge to drain several of them. Withdrawals were halted for about 48 hours before resuming Saturday. The company says it recovered roughly $2.5 billion after Tether and Circle froze stolen stablecoins, and restored 98% of the stolen coins from reserves.
Why it matters: The breach shows how fake recruiter outreach and tampered downloads can open a path into a major exchange, a risk the article says spans the wider corporate sector.
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