The Latest in IT Security

Mark Karpeles, the 28-year-old French CEO of Mt. Gox, which once handled around 80 percent of the world’s bitcoin trades, filed for bankruptcy at a Tokyo District Court late on Friday. “If the theft is true,” said Campbell Harvey, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, “it’s the biggest bank heist in history,” aside from when Saddam Hussein ordered his son to withdraw $1 billion from Iraq’s central bank in 2003. But most observers say Mt. Gox’s laxness played a key role in the debacle. But things got better, he said: “It has been a process of learn-by-doing that they have discovered all sorts of things they should be doing, but were not.” No official explanation has been forthcoming beyond blaming hackers and weaknesses in Mt. Gox’s system.