I write about tech and media from my kayak somewhere in Canada. Also @mathewi on Mastodon, BlueSky and Threads
43.776188,-79.149103
Joined March 2007
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Mathew Ingram retweeted
Ya tenemos la foto completa del hackeo de Binance. Y es mucho peor de lo que se contó anoche: 6.300 millones de dólares. El mayor robo de la historia de las criptomonedas. Cuatro veces el de Bybit.
Os explico lo que ha pasado, porque la historia es de película.
No reventaron ninguna clave privada. Hackearon el portátil de UN ingeniero de Binance. Desde ese portátil accedieron a un contenedor interno del sistema y empezaron a firmar retiradas como si fueran la propia Binance. En una sola transacción contra una de las hot wallets había 50 autorizaciones firmadas. El atacante no rompió la caja fuerte: se sentó en la silla del empleado que tiene la llave.
Resultado: vaciaron hot wallets en DIEZ blockchains a la vez. 200.630 ETH y 185 tokens en Ethereum, 18.270 bitcoins, 233 millones de XRP, más Solana, Tron, Avalanche... La mayor parte de los 6.300 millones salió en apenas 20 minutos.
El detalle que parece escrito por un guionista: dos días antes, Binance había anunciado que acababa de repeler una campaña de hackers de Corea del Norte que usaban falsas entrevistas de trabajo para colar malware. Repelieron el asalto a la puerta y entraron por la ventana del empleado. Hoy TRM Labs y Chainalysis atribuyen el ataque "con alta confianza" a TraderTraitor, la unidad norcoreana del grupo Lazarus. Los mismos de Bybit. Han cuadruplicado su propio récord en 20 meses.
La contraofensiva también ha sido histórica: en menos de 12 horas se han congelado unos 3.000 millones. Tether bloqueó más de 1.500, Circle 823, Ripple unos 200 en RLUSD, y hasta Coinbase, el mayor competidor de Binance, se ofreció a ayudar bloqueando envíos a las direcciones del hacker. La mitad del botín ya está muerto. La otra mitad, en Bitcoin y Ethereum que nadie puede congelar, se está lavando ahora mismo en cadenas de transferencias cada vez más pequeñas.
Binance ha suspendido las retiradas mientras revisa sus sistemas, asegura que los fondos de los usuarios serán cubiertos al completo, y espera reabrir en unas 48 horas. Ese será el verdadero momento de la verdad: el día que reabran, veremos si la confianza aguanta.
Y una reflexión final: el mayor hackeo de la historia no ha tocado la criptografía. Ha tocado a una persona. Las blockchains funcionaron perfectamente. El eslabón débil sigue siendo el mismo de siempre.
A Binance lo hackearon por una nueva estafa que se llama entrevista de trabajo.
Binance tiene mucho software y son más vulnerables, hay más formas de entrar, requiere mayor seguridad.
En el caso de Tangem o Ledger, tu tienes toda la seguridad de la propia blockchain, y no estás expuesto en diferentes servidores ni eres un blanco público de billones de dólares, a no ser que tu la cagues interactuando con algún protocolo que no deberías o comprendo tu wallets ya modificada.
Y es importante que se entienda que han hackeado a Binance, no a la blockchain .
Mathew Ingram retweeted
The largest crypto exchange in the world just experienced the largest robbery in human history—and the person running it is a nomadic autistic man in Dubai posting “Funds are SAFU!”
What a time to be alive.
Mathew Ingram retweeted
North Korean state hackers appear to have been behind the Binance attack. The entire event started through a single DevOps engineer's compromised laptop. With the confirmed impact now at $6.3 billion, it is by far the largest crypto heist in history.
Mathew Ingram retweeted
Between the AI-powered hacking of the infrastructure, the death of the link economy, and the continued closing of the open web, is there anything left of the internet we once knew? torment-nexus.mathewingram.c…
Mathew Ingram retweeted
The ranking members of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees have written a letter to President Trump asking whether he has been soliciting advice from Grok in order to help carry out his official duties as President of the United States.
They also demanded that he preserve any prompts sent to Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, as well as outputs in response to those prompts, that were 'submitted to AI chatbots in carrying out your constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties.'
The letter was provided by Politico.
This is like giving me a 10-cent fine for speeding
Rogers busted for falsely advertising "unlimited" data plans and fined $15 million plus legal costs by the Competition Tribunal decisions.ct-tc.gc.ca/ct-tc/…
Mathew Ingram retweeted
Rogers busted for falsely advertising "unlimited" data plans and fined $15 million plus legal costs by the Competition Tribunal decisions.ct-tc.gc.ca/ct-tc/…
Mathew Ingram retweeted
Putting a 5-day-long job in your bio certainly requires a certain kind of chutzpah that you almost have to admire
Mathew Ingram retweeted
Fox: Why are you here this morning?
Trump rally attendee: Well, in the late 70s, I was a little too young to go to South America for the Jonestown Massacre. But this is as close as I'll ever get, so that's why I'm here. There's nothing like seeing a cult right up front.
Mathew Ingram retweeted
Every religion in history has promised miracles and warned of the apocalypse. Anthropic is the first to file both with the SEC.
Mathew Ingram retweeted
FIELDS MEDALIST TESTED IF HE'S OBSOLETE
timothy gowers took an open problem from a new paper on additive combinatorics and handed it to chatgpt 5.5 pro.
no fancy prompts. no setup. just the problem statement.
the model thought for 17 minutes. then wrote a complete latex preprint in two.
it took a bound that had been exponential for decades and brought it down to polynomial. the construction was something nobody had tried on this class of problems before.
gowers asked isaac rajagopal to review the work. rajagopal wrote the paper the model was improving on.
his verdict: the key idea is "completely original" and "quite ingenious." "the sort of idea i would be very proud to come up with after a week or two of pondering."
the model spent 17 minutes on it.
then gowers pushed further. gave it the harder generalized version. under an hour, a stronger result. exponential to polynomial again.
gowers on his own mathematical contribution to the whole thing: "zero. i didn't even do anything clever with the prompts."
the result is a solid chapter in a combinatorics phd. publishable mathematics that a graduate student would spend months producing.
a fields medalist. one of the best combinatorialists alive. sitting there copy-pasting prompts while a model does doctoral-level research in front of him.
his conclusion: "the lower bound for contributing to mathematics will now be to prove something that llms can't prove."
he gives the profession until 2029 before it's "transformed out of all recognition."
seventeen minutes. zero human math. a result that takes months by hand.
this was may 2026. five months ago. the model that did it is already outdated.
link to the paper in the comments
Mathew Ingram retweeted
I mean look, AI is hard. I’ve been wrong about many aspects of it and most of the smartest people I follow have been wrong about *something.*
But Ed has been claiming peak AI for more than two years. This is almost literally like covering the Intel IPO in 1971 by bringing on somebody who claimed that Moore’s Law (written in 1965) had peaked in 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1970. It’s not illegal to do this, but your source is confidently commenting on a phenomenon his previous commentary considered impossible.
“Is this just a big circle jerk?” Jon welcomes Ed Zitron (@edzitron), host of the podcast Better Offline, to make sense of the financial house of cards propping up AI and big tech. New pod out now!
Mathew Ingram retweeted
Muse just suggested I email the bride to “make sure she’s aware” it’s going to rain on her wedding day. Biggest sign I’ve seen that the AI is trying to get us to killed.
Between the AI-powered hacking of the infrastructure, the death of the link economy, and the continued closing of the open web, is there anything left of the internet we once knew? torment-nexus.mathewingram.c…
Mathew Ingram retweeted
If someone ran a marathon and someone else drove 26 miles, I wouldn’t praise the driver just for reaching the same finish line
Mathew Ingram retweeted
Laugh all you want but Cheesecake Factories helped this country win WW2. In the 1940s, 23% of the adult population worked in these factories, and the US produced 300 to 400 million tons of Cheesecake per year. We used to build things.
