Published by Delayed Gratification
Words by Harriet Salem
Illustration by Oliver Li
Delayed Gratification is a magazine that uses the slowness of print as a way of returning to stories once the dust has settled. Rather than racing to be first, it takes its time and provides readers with the sort of context and thorough reporting that simply isn’t possible in the moment. Today’s story is a sort of ultra-delayed gratification, because it reports on the world’s biggest ever theft, which took place almost exactly a year ago, and which I’d completely missed until I came across it in the pages of the magazine.
On 21st February last year, Ben Zhou, co-founder of Dubai-based Bybit, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange, logged on to transfer funds from one digital wallet to another. It should have been a routine transaction for Bybit’s CEO, but unbeknown to Zhou one of the company’s storage wallets had been infiltrated by malicious actors. When Zhou signed off on the transfer, instead of sending funds to another Bybit wallet, he unwittingly handed over 401,000 Ether tokens, worth $1.5 billion, to a group of North Korean hackers.
“It was an absolutely stunning attack, just an astonishing amount of money,” says Geoff White, an investigative journalist specialising in technology and cyber-crime. “It’s the biggest theft ever, not just in terms of hacking or a crypto heist. It’s the largest amount ever to be stolen from a single victim.”