The first question that comes to mind after hearing that Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, was hacked to the tune of $6.2 billion is: How the heck can this even happen?

The hack, which lasted several hours, saw the attacker drain Binance's wallets, with hundreds of millions of dollars in BTC, ETH, USDC, USDT, and other cryptocurrencies.

The total tally, according to Binance co-CEO Richard Tang, was $6.3 bililon. Crypto sleuth Wazz put it at $6.17 billion by following crypto wallets, and Binance founder Changpeng 'CZ' Zhao didn't share the actual number, but he did confirm the ballpark.

The first news from Binance about the nature of the hack revealed that the company's wallet private keys had not been leaked. Instead, it was a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop that the hacker used to "gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions."

If you're a Binance user, this doesn't sound comforting. If a single compromised laptop can result in billions being stolen, Binance had better rethink its security practices.

Now, however, Tang shared some additional details about the incident. While reiterating that customer funds are "safe," he said that the hack was a bit more involved than what the statement above implies.

"Our initial investigation suggests this security incident may have started with a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop. That gave an attacker access to a service container, where they submitted unauthorized withdrawal transactions," wrote Tang.

"To be clear: the attacker did not simply use one engineer's permissions, and this was not a single 'one-click' action.

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