China’s ICBC, the world’s biggest bank, hit by cyberattack that reportedly disrupted Treasury markets
A pedestrian walks pass a branch of Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) in Fuzhou, Fujian province of China.
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The U.S. financial services division of Chinese bank ICBC was hit with a cyberattack that reportedly disrupted the trading of Treasurys.
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world’s largest lender by assets, said Thursday that its financial services arm, called ICBC Financial Services, experienced a ransomware attack “that resulted in disruption to certain” systems.
Immediately after discovering the hack, ICBC “isolated impacted systems to contain the incident,” the state-owned bank said.
Ransomware is a type of cyberattack. It involves hackers taking control of systems or information and only letting them go once the victim has paid a ransom. It’s a type of attack that has seen an explosion in popularity among bad actors in recent years.
ICBC did not reveal who was behind the attack but said it has been “conducting a thorough investigation and is progressing its recovery efforts with the support of its professional team of information security experts.”
The Chinese bank also said it is working with law enforcement.
ICBC said it “successfully cleared” U.S. Treasury trades executed Wednesday and repo financing trades done on Thursday. A repo is a repurchase agreement, a type of short-term borrowing for dealers in government bonds.
However, multiple news outlets reported there was disruption to U.S. Treasury trades. The Financial Times, citing traders and banks, said Friday that the ransomware attack prevented the ICBC division from settling Treasury trades on behalf of other market participants.
The U.S. Treasury Department told CNBC: “We are aware of the cybersecurity issue and are in regular contact with key financial sector participants, in addition to federal regulators. We continue to monitor the situation.”
ICBC said the email and business systems of its U.S. financial services arm operate independently of ICBC’s China operations. The systems of its head office, the ICBC New York branch, and other domestic and overseas affiliated institutions were not affected by the cyberattack, ICBC said.
What did the Chinese government say?
Wang Wenbin, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Friday that ICBC is striving to minimize the impact and losses after the attack, according to a Reuters report.
Speaking at a regular news conference, Wang said ICBC has paid close attention to the matter and has handled the emergency response and supervision well, according to Reuters.
What do we know about the ransomware attack?
Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack yet and ICBC has not said who might be behind the attack.
In the cybersecurity world, finding out who is behind a cyberattack is often very difficult due to the techniques hackers use to mask their locations and identities.
But there are clues about what kind of software was used to carry out the attack.
Marcus Murray, founder of Swedish cybersecurity firm Truesec, said the ransomware used is called LockBit 3.0. Murray said this information has come from sources with relations to Truesec, but was unable to reveal who those sources are due to confidentiality reasons. The Financial Times reported, citing two sources, that LockBit 3.0 was the software behind the attack too. CNBC was unable to independently verify the information.
This kind of ransomware can make its way into an organization in many ways. For example, by someone clicking on a malicious link in an email. Once in, its aim is to extract sensitive information about a company.
VMWare cybersecurity team said in a blog last year that LockBit 3.0 is a “challenge for security researchers because each instance of the malware requires a unique password to run without which analysis is extremely difficult or impossible.” The researchers added that the ransomware is “heavily protected” against analysis.
The U.S. government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency calls LockBit 3.0 “more modular and evasive,” making it harder to detect.
LockBit is the most popular strain of ransomware, accounting for around 28% of all known ransomware attacks from July 2022 to June 2023, according to data from cybersecurity firm Flashpoint.
What is LockBit?
The LockBit is the group behind the software. Its business model is known as “ransomware-as-a-service.” It effectively sells its malicious software to other hackers, known as affiliates, who then go on to carry out the cyberattacks.
The leader of the group goes by the online name of “LockBitSup” on dark web hacking forums.
“The group primarily posts in Russian and English, but according to its website, the group claims to be located in the Netherlands and to not be politically motivated,” Flashpoint said in a blogpost.
The group’s malware is known to target small and medium-sized businesses.
LockBit has previously claimed responsibility for ransomware attacks on Boeing and the U.K’s. Royal Mail.
In June, the U.S. Department of Justice charged a Russian national for his involvement in “deploying numerous LockBit ransomware and other cyberattacks” against computers in the U.S., Asia, Europe and Africa.
“LockBit actors have executed over 1,400 attacks against victims in the United States and around the world, issuing over $100 million in ransom demands and receiving at least as much as tens of millions of dollars in actual ransom payments made in the form of bitcoin,” the DOJ said in a press release in June.
— CNBC’s Steve Kopack contributed to this article.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Axel Springer building in Berlin on Oct. 17, 2023. He received the annual Axel Springer Award.
Ben Kriemann | Getty Images
Among the thousands of Microsoft employees who lost their jobs in the cutbacks announced this week were 830 staffers in the company’s home state of Washington.
Nearly a dozen game design workers in the state were part of the layoffs, along with three audio designers, two mechanical engineers, one optical engineer and one lab technician, according to a document Microsoft submitted to Washington employment officials.
There were also five individual contributors and one manager at the Microsoft Research division in the cuts, as well as 10 lawyers and six hardware engineers, the document shows.
Microsoft announced plans on Wednesday to eliminate 9,000 jobs, as part of an effort to eliminate redundancy and to encourage employees to focus on more meaningful work by adopting new technologies, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The person asked not to be named while discussing private matters.
Scores of Microsoft salespeople and video game developers have since come forward on social media to announce their departure. In April, Microsoft said revenue from Xbox content and services grew 8%, trailing overall growth of 13%.
In sales, the company parted ways with 16 customer success account management staff members based in Washington, 28 in sales strategy enablement and another five in sales compensation. One Washington-based government affairs worker was also laid off.
Microsoft eliminated 17 jobs in cloud solution architecture in the state, according to the document. The company’s fastest revenue growth comes from Azure and other cloud services that customers buy based on usage.
CEO Satya Nadella has not publicly commented on the layoffs, and Microsoft didn’t immediately provide a comment about the cuts in Washington. On a conference call with analysts in April, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company had a “focus on cost efficiencies” during the March quarter.
WATCH: Microsoft layoffs not performance-based, largely targeting middle managers
Technology
IPO market gets boost from Circle’s 500% surge, sparking optimism that drought may be ending
Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle Internet Group, the issuer of one of the world’s biggest stablecoins, and Circle Internet Group co-founder Sean Neville react as they ring the opening bell, on the day of the company’s IPO, in New York City, U.S., June 5, 2025.
NYSE
For over three years, venture capital firms have been waiting for this moment.
Tech IPOs came to a virtual standstill in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates, while big acquisitions were mostly off the table as increased regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe turned away potential buyers.
Though it’s too soon to say those days are entirely in the past, the first half of 2025 showed signs of momentum, with June in particular producing much-needed returns for Silicon Valley’s startup financiers. In all, there were five tech IPOs last month, accelerating from a monthly average of two since January, according to data from CB Insights.
Highlighting that group was crypto company Circle, which more than doubled in its New York Stock Exchange debut on June 5, and is now up sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of $42 billion. The stock got a big boost in mid-June after the Senate passed the GENIUS Act, which would establish a federal framework for U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins.
Venture firms General Catalyst, Breyer Capital and Accel now own a combined $8 billion worth of Circle stock even after selling a fraction of their holdings in the offering. Silicon Valley stalwarts Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital are set to soon profit from Figma’s IPO, after the design software vendor filed its public prospectus on Tuesday. Since its $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped in late 2023, Figma has been one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in startup land.
It’s “refreshing and something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” said Eric Hippeau, managing partner at early-stage venture firm Lerer Hippeau, regarding the exit environment. “I’m not sure that we are confident that this can be a sustained trend yet, but it’s been very encouraging.”
Another positive sign for the industry the past couple months was the performance of artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in late March. The stock was relatively stagnant for its first month on the market but shot up 170% in May and another 47% in June.
For venture firms, long considered the lifeblood of risky tech startups, IPOs are essential in order to generate profits for the university endowments, foundations and pension funds that allocate a portion of their capital to the asset class. Without handsome returns, there’s little incentive for limited partners to put money into future funds.
After a record year in 2021, which saw 155 U.S. venture-backed IPOs raise $60.4 billion, according to data from University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter, every year since has been relatively dismal. There were 13 such offerings in 2022, followed by 18 in 2023 and 30 last year, collectively raising $13.3 billion, Ritter’s data shows.
The slowdown followed the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign in 2022, meant to slow crippling inflation. As the lower-growth environment extended into years two and three, venture firms faced increasing pressure to return cash to investors.
‘Backlog of liquidity’
In its 2024 yearbook, the National Venture Capital Association said that even with a 34% increase in U.S. VC exit value last year to $98 billion, that number is 87% below the 2021 peak and less than half the average for the four years from 2017 through 2020. It’s a troubling dynamic for the 58,000 venture-backed companies that have raised a total of $947 billion from investors, according to the annual report, which is produced by the NVCA and PitchBook.
“This backlog of liquidity drought risks creating a ‘zombie company’ cohort — businesses generating operational cash flow but lacking credible exit prospects,” the report said.
Other than Circle, the latest crop of IPOs mostly consists of smaller and lesser-known brands. Health-tech companies Hinge Health and Omada Health are valued at about $3.5 billion and $1 billion, respectively. Etoro, an online trading platform, has a market cap of just over $5 billion. Online banking provider Chime Financial has a higher profile due largely to a years-long marketing blitz and is valued at close to $11.5 billion.
Meanwhile, the highest valued private companies like SpaceX, Stripe and Databricks remain on the sidelines, and AI highfliers OpenAI and Anthropic continue to raise massive amounts of cash with no intention of going public anytime soon.
Still, venture capitalists told CNBC that there are plenty of companies with the financial metrics to be public, and that more of them are readying for the process.
“The IPO market is starting to open and the VC world is cautiously optimistic,” said Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark in New York. “We are preparing companies for the next wave of public offerings.”
There are other ways to make money in the meantime. Secondary sales, a process that involves selling private shares to new investors, are on the rise, allowing early employees and investors to get some liquidity.
And then there’s what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, as he tries to position his company at the center of AI innovation and development.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Last month, Meta announced a $14 billion bet on Scale AI, taking a 49% stake in the AI startup in exchange for poaching founder Alexandr Wang and a small group of his top engineers. The deal effectively bought out half of the stock owned by investors, leaving them with the opportunity to make money on the rest of their holdings, should a future acquisition or IPO take place.
The deal is a big win for Accel, which led Scale AI’s Series A round in 2017, and is poised to earn more than $2.5 billion in the transaction. Index Ventures led the Series B in 2018, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the Series C the following year at a valuation of over $1 billion.
Investors now hope the Federal Reserve will move toward a rate-cutting campaign, though the central bank hasn’t committed to one. There’s also ongoing optimism that regulators will make going public less burdensome. Last week, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that U.S. stock exchanges and the SEC have discussed loosening regulations to make IPOs more enticing.
Mike Bellin, who heads consulting firm PwC’s U.S. IPO practice, said he anticipates a diversity of IPOs across sectors in the second half of the year. According to data from PwC, pharma and fintech were among the most active sectors for deals through the end of May.
While the recent trend in IPO activity is an encouraging sign for investors, potential roadblocks remain.
Tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty delayed IPO plans from companies including Klarna and StubHub in April. Neither has provided an update on when they plan to debut.
FirstMark’s Heitzmann said the path forward is “not at all clear,” adding that he wants to see a strong quarter of economic stability and growth before confidently saying that the market is wide open.
Additionally, other than CoreWeave and Circle, recent tech IPOs haven’t had big pops. Hinge Health, Chime and eToro have seen relatively modest gains from their offer price, while Omada Health is down.
But virtually any activity beats what VCs were experiencing the last few years. Overall, Hippeau said recent IPO trends are generally encouraging.
“There’s starting to be kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” Hippeau said.
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