Maybe I've been too harsh on those mandatory cybersecurity training courses that my company keeps reminding me to do. What looks to be the largest ever cryptocurrency heist may have started with an engineer's compromised laptop, and the attacker got away with more than a couple coins: $6.3 billion in stolen cryptocurrency.

The victim is Binance, by far the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. The hacker made off with tremendous sums of a range of cryptocurrencies, including ethereum, bitcoin, solana, and XRP. The total sums amount to around $6.3 billion worth.

Binance says it has worked with blockchain partners to freeze roughly $3 billion worth of that, leaving $3.3 billion still unaccounted for.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao took to X to suggest that he feels all user funds would be fully covered. Zhao is no longer running Binance following a four-month stint in prison for violating anti-money-laundering laws. He was later pardoned by president Donald Trump. Binance has since confirmed that, yes, it will cover all losses.

"Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop," the company says on X, "which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions."

Binance says it's still figuring out what actually happened here, though experts are already chiming in with what might have gone down.

Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.

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