Binance hit by record $6.3bn crypto hack blamed on North Korea
What happened
Hackers stole about $6.3 billion from crypto exchange Binance, and blockchain analysts blame North Korea, in what they describe as the largest crypto theft on record.
Most of the money left Binance wallets across 10 blockchains in roughly 20 minutes, according to US analytics firm TRM.
TRM and Chainalysis both attribute the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking unit; Binance has not confirmed this and says it is working with law enforcement.
Binance has located and frozen about $3 billion and said nothing about the other $3.3 billion, while Tether froze around $1.6 billion and Circle about $800 million.
Binance co-founder Yi He said the exchange will cover all hacking losses, and the company said it has set aside about $6.34 billion of its own funds for that purpose.
Binance's early findings point to a compromised engineer's laptop, not leaked wallet keys; it expects to resume withdrawals within 48 hours, and crypto stocks including Coinbase fell on the news.
“Binance will cover all hacking losses”
DW
Summary written by AI from 3 independent sources (DW, Cyprus Mail, Guardian) and checked automatically against them for copied text and numbers that are not in the sources. How we work
Open on the live globe →Who reported it
- 2026-10-30 00:55 UTCDW · dw.com ↗
- 2026-10-30 05:47 UTCCyprus Mail · cyprus-mail.com ↗
- 2026-10-30 07:19 UTCTimes of Israel · timesofisrael.com ↗
- 2026-10-30 07:34 UTCGuardian · theguardian.com ↗
- 2026-10-30 13:46 UTCArs Technica · arstechnica.com ↗
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