North Korea Steals $351.6 Million From Bitget

Bitget disclosed today that suspected North Korean operators pulled $351.6 million out of its hot and warm wallets, the ones an exchange keeps connected so funds can move fast. That connectivity is also what made them reachable, and the amount alone puts this above nearly every other reported theft attributed to North Korean state operators this year. Kai Tanner's desk has the full trail: this filing lands six days after four governments jointly named WaterPlum, a separate North Korean recruiting scheme that had already pulled $10.71 million from 7,000 wallets over eight months before anyone put a name to it. Bitget has not detailed how the intruders got in. North Korean operators have targeted hot wallet infrastructure at exchanges repeatedly this year, and regulators in Bitget's operating jurisdictions now have a nine figure number to reconcile against whatever custody standard they thought they had.

Hong Kong's Insurance Authority fined FWD Life HK$19.5 million this week for four separate anti money laundering control failures, roughly HK$4.9 million per failure, under the customer due diligence and monitoring rules that never show up in an embedded value presentation until they do. Rachel Lam's desk has that filing. HKCERT separately warned on CVE-2026-94127, a remote code execution flaw in F5 BIG-IP already being exploited in the wild, with no fixed remediation date for firms still running it unpatched.

Cheung Kwok-keung's desk has a third scene: an underground pipe outside Woodland Garden on MacDonnell Road blew at 1am, sending a two metre column of saltwater into the lobby of one of the pricier addresses in the Mid-Levels. Nobody was hurt. The marble floor was not so lucky. The Chief Executive spent this week on the radio describing his five year vision for the city; the pipes under one of its most established streets are old enough to erupt without warning.

Bitget chose liquidity over custody and paid $351.6 million for it. FWD chose growth metrics over AML rigor and paid HK$19.5 million. Hong Kong's Water Supplies Department left an ageing main unreplaced, and paid in soaked marble instead of money. A hot wallet, a compliance programme, and a hundred year old pipe all failed the same way: nobody monitored them until they broke.