# So what actually happened during this ByBit-dominated week?

Source: https://x.com/MacBudkowski/status/1895465905078812731
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/So-what-actually-happened-during-this-ByBit-dominated-week?index=0x67c1baadce137654198227d88ca28fb87167d31ea4f7d10660401dd846dc1a2bafd6355d
Submitted by macbudkowski.eth on 2025-02-28 UTC, 3 upvotes, 2 comments

## Summary

Bybit lost about $1.4B in what is described as the largest crypto hack in history, and the article says the attack was traced to a compromised developer computer at Safe, a wallet provider, with North Korean hackers responsible. The article credits @zachxbt with first reporting suspicious activity on Bybit. @hasufl argued that Safe is at fault but Bybit also failed to follow best security practices, and @cass_on_mars, who is said to have worked at Coinbase, claimed Bybit used its cold wallet like a hot wallet. The article notes that @pcaversaccio promoted a script for checking Safe transaction hashes, and @OpenZeppelin then built a UI for it.

## Article

We can't have a boring week in crypto so after a few hours of Friday’s bullishness caused by the SEC dropping the Coinbase case, @zachxbt  reported some suspicious activity on ByBit. It turned out we got live coverage of someone stealing $1.4B which makes it the biggest hack in history - they stole as much as it did cost to build Burj Khalifa.

Despite the pressure, @benbybit handled it graciously and gave us a real-world lesson in crisis communication. In the meantime @safe was doing an investigation and it turned out that their dev's computer was compromised by North Korean hackers, and it impacted the UI used by ByBit.

It ofc sparked a big debate what went wrong, and @koeppelmann gave some ideas on how to improve security when using Safe. @EthResearch devs started to discuss how to prevent it in the future, and @apolynya asked for rate-limiting features on Safe and more multi-sig competition. In the meantime, the North Korean parliament decided to add crypto hacks revenue to their annual country’s budget (jk).

Anyway, it felt easy to blame Safe here, but then @hasufl said that sure, Safe is guilty, but so is ByBit which didn't follow the best security practices. @cass_on_mars - who used to work at Coinbase - doubled-down and said that they basically used their cold wallet like a hot wallet.

So, it seems like both Safe and ByBit had some hard lessons and will for sure improve their practices, but no one is ever safe because security is this never ending game of cat and mouse. The good thing is that it turned out that we had a way to prevent that, and @pcaversaccio politely asked everyone to use his fucking script. Soon after @OpenZeppelin  built a UI for it (hope it won't get compromised!), so we can easily test hashes of our Safe transactions.

But the larger question is the one raised by @vrde - why do we have this powerful world computer and we use it like an abacus?

## Comments

**macbudkowski.eth**: Testing these X articles, and a recap format where I tried to connect the dots and links I saw on Kiwi in one short narrative.

BTW you need to get an expensive subscription (about $40-50/mo) to even be able to post these X articles.

**denkeni.eth**: Impressive review 👏🏼 There’s a long way to go to mitigate the vulnerability issues…