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Bithumb's mistake cost $40 billion in bitcoin while the growing war in Iran has provoked cyberattacks with more to come and AI slop is making it difficult for people to determine if content is real.
Operational Error Results in Accidental Distribution of More Than $40 Billion Worth of Bitcoins
South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb accidentally gave away a staggering 620,000 bitcoins worth a total of over $40 billion earlier in the year, triggering a hasty selloff at the exchange. The accident was caused by a surprisingly simple operational error: the exchange had intended to distribute small cash rewards worth upwards of 2,000 Korean won (US$1.40) to each user during a promotional event. However, the prize amounts were accidentally entered in bitcoin instead of Korean won. At the time, one bitcoin was worth approximately $70,000. Bithumb hastily restricted trading and withdrawals within 35 minutes, allowing them to recover about 99.7% of the miscredited amount—leaving over $120 million being sold or withdrawn before affected accounts were frozen. The event provoked a sharp, exchange-local price drop.
Five Cyber Threats Rising with the Middle East Conflict
Modern wars rarely remain confined to physical battlefields. Long before missiles land or troops mobilize, another front often opens quietly across digital networks. Governments, infrastructure operators, and private companies suddenly find themselves pulled into a parallel conflict unfolding in cyberspace. The latest escalation in the Middle East closely follows this pattern. Alongside military activity and retaliatory strikes, cyber operations have intensified across the region. Authorities in the United Arab Emirates reported intercepting between 90,000 and 200,000 attempted cyberattacks per day, with a majority linked to state-sponsored actors. State-backed hackers, advanced persistent threat groups, and politically motivated hacktivists are launching coordinated campaigns aimed at government platforms, critical infrastructure, and private-sector networks. Tech-Channels looks at five trends.
AI Slop Surge: the Top 4 Structural Forces Rewiring Social Media
Manny Ahmed recently warned that people can’t tell confidently what content is real simply through inspection. That one sentence sums up the technical inflection point social media has reached. AI has not simply added new tools to digital platforms. It has altered the physics of content production, distribution, and verification. AI has altered social media before most users realized what was happening. Feeds that once revolved around friends, creators, and curated communities are now saturated with synthetic images, automated cartoons, fabricated wildlife clips, and emotionally engineered viral posts. What critics have labeled “AI slop” is no longer fringe clutter. It is a system-level phenomenon. Below is a ranked analysis of the core technical mechanisms that enable and accelerate AI's slope, ordered by systemic impact.
Santander Places Shared IT at the Heart of Its Cost-and-Growth Strategy
Santander’s two-year growth plan leans heavily on IT transformation built around a common technology platform and a unified global operating model. At its investor day in London on February 25, the European banking giant also shared its vision to achieve profits above €20 billion by 2028, which would be a 40 percent increase over its record 2025 profit. Citing its ‘build-once, reuse everywhere’ approach as a key enabler of growth and cost efficiency, the bank exemplifies how financial services institutions can overcome one of the biggest drags on digital velocity in the sector. When doing business across multiple regions and jurisdictions, financial services companies, being among the most heavily regulated, face a huge duplication of effort challenge, which drains human resources and renders more traditional technology strategies effectively obsolete. This includes multiple onboarding stacks, different regulatory rules by market, parallel data platforms, and inconsistent feature sets to name a few.
Codex as a Command Center for Modern DevOps Work
At first sight, OpenAI’s launch last month of the Codex app for macOS can easily be misread as a mere tooling update. In reality, it is a redefinition of what software development work looks like. Since Codex first launched in April 2025, the way developers interact with AI has changed. Tasks now run for hours or days. Multiple agents operate at once across repositories. Work continues without constant human input. The limiting factor has moved away from model capability and toward coordination and oversight. Traditional IDEs and terminals were designed for hands-on execution. Codex is designed for direction at scale. The desktop app makes that intent explicit. Codex functions as a command center rather than a coding surface. OpenAI has moved AI from the toolchain into the workflow itself. By separating Codex from the IDE and turning it into a standalone control surface, software development starts to resemble modern DevOps operations: define intent, dispatch work, observe outcomes, intervene when required.
