One under appreciated aspect of modern cyber security which comes into focus today with the news that (probably North Korean state) hackers have attempted to steal more than $6bn from Binance and got away with a huge proportion of that sum, is just how good ‘traditional’ banks and other financial institutions have become at cyber resilience when it comes to protecting deposits and transactions, in marked contrast to the seemingly terrible security in the crypto sector.
There is no way a compromised dev ops’ laptop in a bank gets a hacker access to $6billion.
Over the last decade, hackers have walked off with nine or ten figure sums from crypto hacks on more than thirty occasions. The number of traditional banks who have suffered a loss of more than $100million as a result of a cyber attack in the same period is zero or one (depending on how you categorise an event in Brazil last year). The last definite major notable bank event was the North Korean hit on the Bank of Bangladesh in February 2016 which saw them make off with $81 million, as Geoff White has so brilliantly chronicled.
Given the extraordinary hype around cyber security this month these details matter. First, based on what we know so far this hack was no some crazy new AI thing. The main technique used is long established. This event is entirely precedented - the only thing new about it is the amount stolen. Second; there is no specific cause for alarm over the financial system’s security in general as a result of this event: it’s been a notable success. Crypto on the other hand….