"Even the World's No. 1 Fell"... Why South Korea Is on High Alert

[Anchor]

The full picture is starting to emerge regarding the massive cryptocurrency exchange hacking incident suspected to have been carried out by North Korea. Hackers meticulously prepared by staging a rehearsal at least 36 hours in advance, while analysis shows the exchange was completely unaware. More than half of the 8 trillion won stolen is expected to be unrecoverable.

First, a report by An Huijae.

[Reporter]

Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange that suffered the largest hacking attack in history, admitted to its faults just a day after the incident occurred.

[He Yi / Binance Co-Founder: There are many things we did wrong. We should have invested more and earlier in security and established stricter standards.]

The amount of damage identified so far totals 8.4 trillion won.

Security firm TRM Labs analyzed that the hackers conducted a rehearsal to prepare for the attack at least 36 hours beforehand.

However, it is known that Binance was completely unaware of these movements and could only watch as the funds were drained.

Another security firm, Chainalysis, detected circumstances indicating that the hackers were laundering the stolen funds in real-time by mixing them with the proceeds from the Bitget hack that took place last month.

Bitget, another cryptocurrency exchange, was also hacked for 500 billion won in a similar manner, and that incident has likewise been blamed on North Korea.

With the absolute number one company, which accounts for 40 percent of the market, collapsing helplessly, experts point out that South Korean exchanges cannot let their guard down.

[Yeom Heung-yeol / Professor Emeritus, Department of Information Security, Soonchunhyang University: If a top-tier cryptocurrency exchange is hacked and virtual assets are illegally stolen, we cannot rule out the possibility that identical incidents could occur anywhere in the world....]

While it is understood that more than half of the hacked funds cannot be recovered, Binance announced that it will compensate for the entire amount of the damage using company funds.

(Video by: Cho Chang-hyun | Video Editing by: Park Na-young | Design by: Cho Soo-in)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.