Razzlekhan, Dutch and the Biggest Crypto Heist Gone Wrong

The hackers had been inside the Bitfinex servers for weeks before attempting the heist. They’d watched users on the cryptocurrency exchange buy and sell Bitcoins. They’d studied the commands that controlled the security system. It was as if they were hiding in an air duct above a bank’s vault, watching as tellers meticulously moved cash in and out, looking for vulnerabilities.

Inside the World’s Biggest Bitcoin Ha...

They weren’t after Bitcoins, exactly. Bitcoins only exist as entries in a database maintained by computers around the world. What they needed were the private keys: cryptographic passwords that would allow them to ...