Cryptocurrency Heists: A New Kind of Crime Story
One of the biggest cryptocurrency heists in history was the Mt. Gox collapse, which took place before exchanges became a multibillion-dollar industry.
Mt. Gox dominated Bitcoin trading at its peak, handling roughly 70% of global Bitcoin trading volume.
Security breaches plagued Mt. Gox for years, but users didn't grasp the scale of the problem until February 2014 when the exchange suddenly suspended withdrawals.
At the time, the loss was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and it wasn't until later research that such attacks could account for only a tiny fraction of the missing funds.
The company initially blamed problems involving Bitcoin's transaction-malleability vulnerability but later found that 200,000 bitcoins were discovered in an old digital wallet.