Nuntii Europae

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North Korean hackers blamed for $6.3 billion theft from Binance

Trackers call it the largest cryptocurrency theft on record. Binance says it has replaced the stolen funds and froze about 2.7 billion dollars with partners.

A glowing vault spills coins along digital paths; most are stopped by locked gates while a few vanish into darkness where a distant hooded figure waits.
Illustration generated with AI.

More than $6.3 billion has been stolen from Binance, the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, in what the FBI and US Secret Service say was an attack by North Korean hackers. TRM, a blockchain research firm, tallied the outflow at about $6.36 billion on October 29. Binance said it will cover all losses from its SAFU fund and its own funds. Chainalysis, a blockchain research firm, and other trackers describe it as the largest cryptocurrency theft on record, surpassing February 2025's $1.5 billion theft from the exchange Bybit.

TRM said most of the money left in about 20 minutes, starting at 20:05 UTC on October 29, across ten blockchains.

Binance said the attacker used a laptop belonging to a compromised DevOps engineer to gain access to a service container and submit withdrawal transactions without authorisation. It suspended withdrawals immediately as a precaution while it completed security checks. The company said it then worked with blockchain partners to freeze the affected assets. About 3 billion dollars in value sits frozen on-chain, according to Binance.

Binance kept the exchange shut for several days while it replaced the stolen coins from its reserves, reopening deposits and withdrawals on Sunday morning. Stablecoin issuers Tether, Circle, Ripple and World Liberty Financial froze about 2.67 billion dollars, and Arbitrum's Security Council locked 8,426 ETH and 74.6 million ARB tokens, according to BleepingComputer, a technology news website. Together those freezes total about 2.7 billion dollars. The attacker still holds more than 420,000 ETH and 18,270 BTC, about 2.4 billion dollars, beyond any issuer's reach, according to a tally from BleepingComputer that has not been independently confirmed.

President Donald Trump, speaking at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Saturday, said he was not concerned and that the United States is still learning who was behind the theft. Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, rejected the FBI's account in a statement carried by KCNA, the state news agency. She called the claims absurd rhetoric that brought nothing new, pointing to earlier American accusations over the Bybit hack.