How ‘Booth Babes’ Can Result in Huge Hacks Like Drift’s
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Hey, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this livestream. Before we get started, a quick reminder, nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guest and I may hold assets discussed in the show. For more disclosures, visit unchainedcrypto.com. Bitcoin changed how money works. Citrea changes how Bitcoin scales. With a trust minimized BTC and a native stablecoin, CTUSD, Citrea enables Bitcoin capital markets with lending, privacy, Bi
Good to be here.
Hi. Thanks for having us.
When we originally booked this podcast, we thought we were going to focus on how Circle handled the Drift hack. But over the weekend, when Drift gave its postmortem on how the attack was actually six months in the making, we realized we needed to cover that huge story as well. So let's start with that. For listeners who weren't on crypto Twitter this Easter weekend, Michael, do you wanna catch people up to speed on what exactly Drift said about how they got compromised?
Yeah. I'd love to. It definitely took up a lot of my Sunday, and the Sunday of many other security professionals in the space that have been commenting on it. I mean, the short version, like, we knew this was pro likely a sophisticated attacker when the hack happened. I was actually having dinner with some security professionals at ECC in Con France when this all went down. So, I've been hearing the play by play since. But then Sunday, I think what we learned was, you know, lots of speculation that this was gonna be a sophisticated attacker, possibly DPRK link. We haven't confirmed that, but i
Yeah. I think, like, what really struck me was they met these people in person multiple times at different crypto conferences, and they were technically or I'm quoting the the Drift blog post about it, but it said they were technically fluent, had verifiable professional backgrounds and were familiar with how Drift operated. They also deposited $1,000,000 of their own capital. They onboarded a vault onto Drift, which required them filling out a forum with their strategy. I mean, this this was so detailed. And the fact that the LinkedIn profile or whatever it was that the professional backgroun
I don't know. I remember reading this and thinking I feel like not enough people watch Homeland. And, like and I and I say that half jokingly only because about a year or two ago, me and Alex O'Neil wrote an article sounding the alarm on digitally enabled sanctions evasion. And the point that we were trying to make is that this is, to Michael's point, very rapidly becoming nation state sponsored level activity. And I think people don't realize the ramifications of that. I remember when I was at Chainalysis in 2020, I did this, like, risk training trying to tell everyone at the company, all of
And I'm sorry. So I've always just thought it was pretty much North Korea, but what are the other nation state actors that are trying to do this type of attack?
I don't know if anyone's as sophisticated as North Korea here. I'll defer to Michael. I think Russia, like, does I don't think they're at that I don't wanna insult them, but I don't know that they're at the hacking level that DPRK is. I think they all have kind of they are all developing their own methods and tools. Right? So, like, Russia has grand tax. They've had other things, like, in terms of how they wanna take money launder and see their way in the space. Michael, I'll defer to you. I don't I don't I think North
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