Binance hackers stole $6.3 billion in record-breaking crypto heist
Binance says it will cover all loses resulting from the hack. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Turbosquid Binance has disclosed that $6.3 billion worth of crypto funds have been stolen from the platform, in what's believed to be the biggest cryptocurrency hack on record. In a series of updates posted to X, the crypto exchange said that user funds are safe, and that around $3 billion of the impacted assets have…
Key points
- Binance says $6.3 billion in crypto was stolen, believed to be the largest crypto hack on record.
- About $3 billion of the affected assets have been frozen, and Binance will cover losses.
- Blockchain firms TRM and Chainalysis attribute the attack to North Korean group TraderTraitor.
Binance has disclosed that $6.3 billion worth of crypto funds were stolen from the platform, in what is believed to be the biggest cryptocurrency hack on record. The exchange said in updates posted to X that user funds are safe and that around $3 billion of the impacted assets have been frozen so far.
Binance has committed to covering any losses from the hack. It said it has reserved over $6.34 billion of company funds for the incident, $5 billion of which is already held in the exact token assets that were affected, alongside an emergency reserve fund of around $1.3 billion at last valuation.
How the attack unfolded
Binance said its initial investigation suggested a compromised laptop may have been involved, but later investigation uncovered additional points of breach. A prior update described a laptop belonging to one of its DevOps engineers that let an attacker access a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.
Deposits and withdrawals have been suspended in response, and authorization for the affected address has been revoked. Co-CEO Richard Teng said the attacker did not simply use one engineer's permissions and that it was not a single "one-click" action, adding that no evidence of a wallet private key leak has been found.
This is an extraordinary hack, for its size and for the response... Few financial systems have ever shown a theft of this scale
— TRM chief policy officer Ari Redbord
Scale and attribution
Blockchain analysis firms TRM and Chainalysis both attribute the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean cybercrime group with a history of stealing from crypto exchanges. According to TRM, most of the theft occurred over just 20 minutes.
The haul is four times higher than the previous record, when $1.46 billion was stolen from Bybit last year. Binance was also hacked in 2019, when $40 million worth of crypto assets at the time were stolen.
