“If we saw 7,500 ransomware attacks last year, now we don't need humans. We don't need affiliates. We can have agentic affiliates. Why isn't that 75,000 or 7.5 million? And that's a civilization-level threat when North Korea has that level of capability to take down entire hospital systems, entire giant exchanges.”
sputnikintelligence.com
The host suggested that even if AI wasn't used in the $6 billion Binance hack, the industry should prepare as if it was. Redbord, of blockchain-intelligence firm TRM Labs, agreed and said this scaling scenario is what keeps him up at night.
…sort of moving these funds and kind of build out that entire picture? But I would say that like that was a long window saying I'm not sure. But if I had to, you know, if I had to bet, I believe it was probably used in some way, you know, here, if nothing else, to work sort of on the exploit piece.
Maybe another way to say what you're saying is like, even if the answer is no, we should prepare as if the answer is yes.
100%. I mean, like what we've seen over the last September, October is this just increasing spike in cyber activity. And, you know, if you ask me what keeps me up at night, it's that, right? It's, hey, if we saw 7,500 ransomware attacks last year, now we don't need humans. We don't need, you know, we don't need affiliates. We can have agentic affiliates. Why isn't that 75,000 or 7.5 million? And that's a civilization-level threat when North Korea has that level of capability to take down entire hospital systems, entire giant exchanges. So I think that whether it was used or not, it's absolutely something that, I don't know, I will likely spend the rest of my career working on, to be sure.
What does the industry need to do in reaction to this? How should the industry adapt or change what we do, how we do it in order to mitigate future instances like this?
You know, look, I think it's an offense-defense type of game here. And I think it's in part we really, as a community from the smallest DeFi protocol up to the Binances of the world, really lean into cybersecurity. You know, look, like while we couldn't have recovered funds as fast from a bank, no…
as well. Stress eating some candy. I definitely can take a little bit of the edge off. Ari, well, I'm glad you have, I'm glad we have you in crypto. I know it. It was a tough day. It's a tough day for the industry, kind of on the four-year anniversary of FTX, more or less. But there was nonetheless…