Wall Street Breakfast Podcast: The Biggest Heist In History

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Kenneth Cheung/iStock Unreleased via Getty ImagesDownload this episode on Apple Podcasts/Spotify or listen below:Binance reports $6.3B in potential losses from a massive breach. (0:17) Intel plunges as a PC slowdown derails its turnaround. (1:33) Reddit considers mandatory logins as AI search hits traffic. (2:37)The following is an abridged transcript:Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, disclosed that a security breach had resulted in a staggering $6.3B in losses. Industry watchers are calling it crypto’s biggest-ever hack.“We have worked with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets, with ~$3 billion frozen on-chain so far,” Binance posted."User funds remain safe," the company added in a statement. "As a precaution, all deposits and withdrawals are temporarily suspended while our security teams conduct checks, secure wallet infrastructure, and trace affected assets, with the close support of our law enforcement and industry partners."The company now expects to begin resuming withdrawal services within the next 48 hours, according to a post by co-founder Yi He. Deposits, which were initially suspended, are now operating normally."Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions,” the company said.Analysts warned that the incident could be the largest cryptocurrency heist ever recorded, potentially prompting investors to reassess the risks associated with holding digital assets.Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC-USD) and Ethereum (ETH-USD) are lower this morning.Intel (INTC) is plunging more than 25% after the company issued guidance that fell well short of what investors were expecting, due to a slowdown in the PC market.For Q4, Intel said it expects revenue to be between $15B and $16B, with the midpoint well shy of the $17.05B estimate. Adjusted EPS is forecast to be $0.25 vs. the $0.43 consensus. Closely watched adjusted gross margins are expected to be 38%, below the 42.8% estimate.CEO Lip-Bu Tan said on the earnings call that in recent weeks, “our customers began signaling a PC slowdown based on the memory prices and availability.”“The pace of this PC correction has accelerated over the last two months, as our OEM partners are aggressively managing inventory to match the softer sell-through. We expect the current environment to persist until memory availability and prices begin to normalize.”Seeking Alpha analyst Bill Maurer said the results were “mostly disappointing” and the guidance was “much weaker than expected.”“After revenue growth was finally starting to look impressive, the current forecast represents a major step back for the ongoing turnaround,” he said.And Reddit (RDDT) CEO Steve Huffman has proposed requiring users to sign in to access most content as a way to curb data scraping.He also blamed Google's (GOOG) (GOOGL) AI-powered search features for contributing to a decline in referral traffic."Google is crawling us as hard as ever, so the demand hasn't changed from their point of view either. The reality is, the AI mode does not drive traffic, not for us and not to anybody," Huffman said on the earnings call Thursday.Reddit is down more than 20% premarket after Huffman cautioned that daily active unique visitors could decline by a low double-digit percentage in Q4 from about 130M if referral traffic continues to weaken.But Madison and Wall analyst Luke Stillman says requiring users to log in “creates another barrier to engagement, particularly for casual users."In premarket tradingNasdaq 100 futures (US100:IND) are more than 2% lower, set to add to the previous session’s losses, at least at the open.Intel’s aforementioned guidance and a post-earnings tumble in Amazon (AMZN) spooked tech investors a day before Halloween.Amazon is down nearly 7% after sales and capital expenditure guidance overshadowed accelerating growth in Amazon Web Services.We’ll see if dip-buyers can turn this trick into a treat before the closing bell.On the economic calendar8:30 a.m. Q3 Employment Cost Index9:45 a.m. October Chicago PMI