The Eternal Denial of Service

On October 29, Binance lost about $6.3 billion (Molly White’s Web3 Is Going Just Great has the entry). Blockchain analysts at TRM Labs traced most of it leaving in about twenty minutes. Two days later the FBI named the thief: TraderTraitor, the North Korean unit that took $1.5 billion from Bybit in February 2025. Binance’s preliminary account starts with one DevOps engineer’s compromised laptop. Bybit’s started with a developer machine at Safe{Wallet}, the multisig vendor behind Bybit’s cold wallet.

Same group, same kind of door. Twenty months later they walked out with four times the money.

The deck #

You’ve seen this deck. It goes to the board every quarter. One slide says something like 98% of staff completed security awareness training. Another lists vendor findings rated high and critical, each with an owner, a mitigation and a target date, most of them green. The audit committee asks two questions and moves on; the minutes record that cyber risk was reviewed.

Every number on that deck can be true. The security team counts activity: courses finished, findings closed. The directors walk out believing the activity adds up to safety.

Take the training slide. Researchers at UC San Diego ran an eight-month randomized trial on more than 19,500 employees of UC San Diego Health and presented it at the 2025 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. They found no relationship between how recently someone had finished annual awareness training and whether that person clicked a simulated phish. By the eighth month, more than half the staff had clicked at least one.

Training is graded by the training. The course reports its own completion rate and quiz scores, and the slide repeats them. Grade it instead by new findings in the areas it covered. If the module taught phishing and the next simulation still catches half the floor, it failed. If it taught secrets handling and next quarter’s scan finds cloud keys in a repository, it failed, whatever the completion rate says.

The vendor slide is worse, because it looks like rigor. It lists what somebody already reported: a CVE a scanner matched, a finding a supplier disclosed. It has no row for what one compromised laptop can reach, the question Bybit and Binance both answered the expensive way.

The laptop nobody hardens #

Every theft in the opening came through an engineer’s computer. Developers, DevOps engineers and platform engineers carry production on their laptops: cloud console sessions, CI/CD tokens, Kubernetes credentials, SSH keys, sometimes signing keys. Most security programs manage those machines like the rest of the fleet, with the same image, the same endpoint agent and the same annual course. The deck’s endpoint slide shows agent coverage near 100%. It doesn’t show which laptops can push to production, mint an access token or sign a withdrawal.

Attackers sort the fleet that way. CISA’s 2022 advisory on TraderTraitor describes spearphishing aimed at crypto-company staff, often in system administration and DevOps roles, with fake job offers and malware-laced trading apps. Crypto isn’t special. In 2022 an attacker got into a senior DevOps engineer’s home computer at LastPass through a vulnerable third-party media package, keylogged the master password to the engineer’s corporate vault, and used the keys inside to reach cloud backups. That December, malware that CircleCI’s antivirus missed landed on one engineer’s laptop and stole a 2FA-backed single sign-on session. The engineer could generate production access tokens, and the company’s incident report says the attacker left with customer environment variables, tokens and keys.

Bybit, Binance, LastPass, CircleCI: the same door each time.

Attackers run the real audit #

Nobody tests the deck except attackers. With AI they find out what’s true at a fraction of the old cost.

In a November 2025 report, Anthropic said a group it assessed as Chinese state-sponsored had turned Claude Code into an intrusion engine aimed at roughly thirty organizations, financial institutions among them, and got into a small number of them. The AI did 80% to 90% of the campaign; Anthropic estimated humans stepped in at four to six decision points. At peak the AI made thousands of requests, often several per second.

Then Anthropic disclosed what its own unreleased model could do. Claude Mythos Preview, announced in April with Project Glasswing, had found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Some had survived decades of human review. Anthropic wrote that AI models “can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities,” and warned the capability may soon spread past the people committed to using it safely.

Your vendor list holds the flaws somebody reported. An attacker with a model like that reads your code and your network directly and writes a list of their own.

A denial of service that never ends #

A distributed denial-of-service attack ends when the traffic stops, and Cloudflare absorbs that traffic at the edge before it reaches you. Its autonomous defenses stopped a record 31.4 Tbps flood in late 2025, and in the third quarter of 2026, 96% of the network-layer attacks it saw ended in under ten minutes. You file the incident report and move on. The eternal denial of service ends the company, and nobody is left to file the report.

Code Spaces, a code-hosting company, learned this in June 2014. An intruder took over its Amazon Web Services control panel, and when staff tried to regain control, the intruder deleted most of its data, machine images and backups. Code Spaces announced it could no longer operate. KNP Logistics, a 158-year-old British haulier, was in administration by September 2023, three months after the Akira ransomware gang got in, reportedly by guessing an employee’s password. Around 700 people lost their jobs.

Binance survived. It pledged to cover customer losses from company money, far beyond its emergency fund of about $1 billion, and it says it froze more than $2.5 billion of the stolen assets with help from stablecoin issuers. Bybit borrowed its way back to full reserves in about 72 hours. Both had balance sheets most companies will never have.

Imagine it was NYSE or Nasdaq #

Binance could write a check. A stock exchange can’t, because what the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq sell is certainty: the trade happened at the price on the tape, and the record of who owns what is right. Corrupt that record and no wire transfer puts it back.

We’ve had previews. The NYSE halted trading for about three and a half hours on July 8, 2015, over a configuration problem, with no attacker involved. LockBit ransomware hit ICBC Financial Services, the U.S. broker-dealer of ICBC, the world’s largest bank, in November 2023. Staff carried settlement details around Manhattan on USB sticks, and Reuters reported that the blackout left the unit temporarily owing $9 billion to BNY Mellon, many times its net capital, until its parent put in cash. That was one firm in the Treasury market.

Now picture TraderTraitor, or any crew holding the tools Anthropic warns will spread, inside the exchange’s matching engine or on its link to the clearinghouse. Binance’s twenty minutes, on the market that holds your pension.

Cloudflare absorbs a DDoS at the edge. When an attacker turns a gap in your operational risk into an exposure you can’t cover, nothing absorbs that. Your organization is over, and the attack was an eternal denial of service.

Binance Founder, CZ, issues big WARNING.

"If a crypto exchange can be hacked, banks are in a worse position."

"This is not just a #crypto problem. This is actually a much wider information security problem." pic.twitter.com/57NDwNY4Um

— Altcoin Daily (@AltcoinDaily) November 3, 2026