Binance lost about $6.3 billion in a single burst, the largest crypto theft on record. The early finding points to a compromised engineer laptop that reached an internal service able to submit withdrawals, which means the transactions looked authorized at every checkpoint they passed.
The failure wasn’t a missing tool. It was that nobody owned the whole path from a developer machine to a withdrawal. So nobody tested it, fixed it, and tested it again.
Waseem Ahmed, Head of Engineering, Secure.com:
“The $6.3 Billion Binance hack Is a wake-up Call: the traditional security model needs to change.
“Most of the money left in about 20 minutes. That is the detail security teams should sit with. Binance’s investigation is still open. Early reports pointed to a compromised DevOps machine, but the company has since said the attack involved additional breach points and was not simply one engineer’s permissions. The pattern is still familiar: an action can be technically authorised and still not be legitimate, and monitoring alone will not tell you the difference in time.
“Three questions worth asking this week. What could our most privileged developer identity reach if it were stolen? Would we see that use in minutes, not hours? Is there a human approval step before an irreversible transfer?
“The organisations that close this gap test their own attack paths continuously, and they decide in advance what gets contained automatically and what needs a person.”
Hopefully organizations wake up to the fact that to be fully protected from hacks, everything must be considered. Otherwise you get stories like this.
Related
This entry was posted on November 2, 2026 at 11:01 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Binance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The $6.3 Bill Binance ownership failure & 3 Qs CEOs must ask
Binance lost about $6.3 billion in a single burst, the largest crypto theft on record. The early finding points to a compromised engineer laptop that reached an internal service able to submit withdrawals, which means the transactions looked authorized at every checkpoint they passed.
The failure wasn’t a missing tool. It was that nobody owned the whole path from a developer machine to a withdrawal. So nobody tested it, fixed it, and tested it again.
Waseem Ahmed, Head of Engineering, Secure.com:
“The $6.3 Billion Binance hack Is a wake-up Call: the traditional security model needs to change.
“Most of the money left in about 20 minutes. That is the detail security teams should sit with. Binance’s investigation is still open. Early reports pointed to a compromised DevOps machine, but the company has since said the attack involved additional breach points and was not simply one engineer’s permissions. The pattern is still familiar: an action can be technically authorised and still not be legitimate, and monitoring alone will not tell you the difference in time.
“Three questions worth asking this week. What could our most privileged developer identity reach if it were stolen? Would we see that use in minutes, not hours? Is there a human approval step before an irreversible transfer?
“The organisations that close this gap test their own attack paths continuously, and they decide in advance what gets contained automatically and what needs a person.”
Hopefully organizations wake up to the fact that to be fully protected from hacks, everything must be considered. Otherwise you get stories like this.
Share this:
Like this:
Related
This entry was posted on November 2, 2026 at 11:01 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Binance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.