Wednesday
Room 2
17:40 - 18:40
(UTC+01)
Talk (60 min)
What we can learn from the World's Biggest Heists
Have you heard of Axie Infinity? Its a computer game with an in game economy based on the Ethereum blockchain. So what? You might ask... Well, it became popular, very popular, some say the most popular game in existence. In game economies have always spawned grey IRL economies despite, in many cases, the best efforts of game developers to prevent them. But the in-game economy, based on real crypto-assets, of Axie Infinity grew so big that it became a target for what has been called the biggest robbery of all time - the Sky Mavis hack.
How did this robbery happen? What was the (both sophisticated and age-old) kill chain that enabled it?
After the robbery the story gets even more interesting. Any detective will always tell you, "follow the money!". Crime only pays if you can convert those ill gotten gains into a currency you spend to buy real things. So how do you launder the proceeds from the biggest robbery ever? The answer might be surprising, it winds through a crypto mixer set up to operate as a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation), following the funds, US Government sanctions (recently ruled illegal by an appeal court), an activist campaign and potentially far reaching privacy consequences for all of us.
In this talk we'll analyse the kill chain of the initial attack, where the money led and how this could affect all of us. I'll go through the main takeaways that everybody should be interested in.
James Birnie
James has been working on commercial software since the late 1990s, when TDD was something you studied but never did, pipelines were something that carried oil and Agile and Lean were words used to describe gymnasts. In 2006 he joined a startup and worked there for 9 years which included rewrites, cloud migration and Agile transformation.
In 2015 he started life as a consultant and worked with a variety of clients trying to effect real organisational change by focusing on code quality, culture, a belief in outcomes over processes and a drive for continuous improvement. After leaving consultancy James worked as Head of Platform in a Fintech before it was acquired for $1Bn by Visa and VP of Engineering in a startup, where he learnt how to apply his knowledge of Agile and DevOps to drive positive outcomes in Platform and Cyber Security Teams.
James now works as an independent consultant and is mainly driving transformation in Cyber Security at a major UK bank.