26 Feb Bybit Suffers Largest Crypto Hack In History

$1.5 billion cybersecurity wake-up call for cryptocurrency exchanges

– Steve Morgan, Editor-in-Chief

Northport, N.Y. – Feb. 26, 2025

This story is brought to you by Cryptosec, a leading crypto cybersecurity and crypto investigations firm. Securing Tomorrow’s Finance, Today. Learn more at Cryptosec.com.

Bloomberg reports that a $1.5 billion (USD) hack of the Bybit exchange was the largest crypto theft ever. 

Running a cryptocurrency exchange is a risky business, as hacking victims like Mt. Gox, Bitfinex, FTX, and plenty of others can attest. But never before has a platform for buying and selling crypto lost a 10-figure dollar sum in a single heist, according to WIRED. That new record belongs to Bybit, which on Feb. 21, revealed that thieves hacked its Ethereum-based holdings.

Dubai-based ByBit called the incident a sophisticated attack and said in an X post “Any teams with expertise in blockchain analytics and fund recovery who can assist in tracing these assets are welcome to collaborate with us.”

The attack on Bybit has been linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, a state-sponsored hacking collective.

“This ByBit heist isn’t just another crypto hack—it’s a $1.5 billion wake-up call for the entire industry, said Arthur Hughes, Director at Cryptosec and an expert in crypto crime. Hughes added that when even a major crypto-native exchange can be hit so hard, all traditional financial institutions, that are now rapidly adopting virtual assets, must take a hard look at their crypto-specific security and incident response.”

The hack was a reminder that, for all its growing influence in politics, crypto remains something of an international free-for-all – a chaotic market in which even the most experienced investors sometimes suffer extreme losses, according to The New York Times.

Ben Zhou, chief executive of Bybit, said the exchange can cover the massive loss, noted The Wall Street Journal, quoting an X post by Zhou.

As part of the investigation and recovery efforts, on Feb. 22, Bybit pledged 10 percent of recovered funds to reward ethical cyber and network security experts who play an active role in retrieving the stolen cryptocurrencies in the incident.

Mojca Ivezic, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Cryptosec said that “When $1.5 billion vanishes in a single hack, it’s not just about the money lost—trust in the entire emerging financial system takes a hit … but, credit to Bybit and the broader crypto community for rallying so quickly, keeping a single exploit from snowballing into a crisis of confidence. Ivezic added that Cryptosec believes the future of finance can be both radically open, as well as rigorously secure.”

Bybit calls itself the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume.

For more on the ByBit hack, visit ByBitHack.com.

– Steve Morgan is founder and Editor-in-Chief at Cybersecurity Ventures.

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