As $2.5 billion transferred from Binance in single transaction; how it cost hackers just $15; the massive cryptocurrency theft’s ‘big shock’

It took hackers just $15 to unlock access to $2.5 billion, followed by a matter of seconds to move the entire sum, to pull off the largest cryptocurrency theft on record. That striking reality sits at the center of the historic cryptocurrency theft from Binance, where attackers leveraged an advanced Ethereum feature to siphon roughly 40% of their total haul in one single transaction. This incident was part of a broader, sophisticated cyberattack that drained an estimated $6.3 billion worth of digital assets from Binance, according to Bloomberg. The FBI has tied the breach to North Korea.Binance disclosed that the breach began when an engineer fell for a fake job posting and downloaded malicious code, granting the hackers entry into internal systems. What followed was a high-level exploitation of Ethereum’s underlying mechanics that allowed the intruders to move billions even while the exchange scrambled to lock down its operations.