Binance hackers stole $6.3 billion in record-breaking crypto heist

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 been frozen so far.

Binance has publicly committed to covering any losses resulting from the hack. The company has an emergency reserve fund of around $1.3 billion (at last valuation) to protect user assets in these situations, and said it has also reserved over $6.34 billion of company funds to cover this incident —   $5 billion of which is “already held in the exact token assets that were impacted.”

“Our initial investigation suggested that the security incident may have involved a compromised laptop, however our subsequent investigation has uncovered additional points of breach,” Binance reported on X. “This was a complex attack, and we are doing all we can in coordination with law enforcement to resolve it.”

The company shared details about the compromised laptop that belongs to one of its DevOps engineers in a prior update, saying it allowed an attacker to access a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. Deposits and withdrawals have been suspended in response to the hack, and the affected address has had its authorization revoked.

[Media: https://twitter.com/binance/status/2115993361517891592]

“To be clear: the attacker did not simply use one engineer’s permissions, and this was not a single ‘one-click’ action. It involved a more complex attack process,” Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said on X. “Our investigation has not attributed responsibility to any individual. So far, we have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak.”

Binance may not be pointing fingers at who’s behind the attack, but blockchain analysis firms TRM and Chainalysis both attribute it to TraderTraitor, a North Korean cybercrime hacking group that has a history of stealing funds from cryptocurrency exchanges. This is the largest known cryptocurrency heist in history — four times higher than the previous record, when $1.46 billion was stolen from Bybit last year — and according to TRM, most of the theft occurred over a period of just 20 minutes.

[Media: https://twitter.com/_RichardTeng/status/2116072080525656150]

This isn’t the first time Binance has been hacked, having suffered a previous security breach in 2019 in which $40 million worth of crypto assets (valued at the time) were stolen. The latest hack comes as cases of large-scale crypto theft are escalating, however, after several heists were disclosed by crypto companies in September. There are also new concerns around how AI tools can be used maliciously against the industry, with OpenAI reporting earlier this month that one of its models managed to swipe fake crypto on an Ethereum test network it didn’t have access to.

“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 said in a statement to Sky News. “The theft shows how exposed the system is to sophisticated attackers moving at a speed we have never seen.”