Analytics firms blame North Korea. Binance says it will cover all losses and expects withdrawals to resume within 48 hours.
SINGAPORE – Hackers stole $6.3 billion from Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, in what analysts say is the biggest crypto hack ever, Reuters reported. Binance said Thursday that a security incident affected about $6.3 billion in assets and that about $3 billion has been frozen on-chain so far.
Stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle froze nearly $1.57 billion and more than $800 million, respectively, and Ripple froze about $200 million, according to Reuters. Binance has not said what happened to the remaining $3.3 billion or so.
Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said an initial investigation suggests the incident may have started with a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop that gave an attacker access to a service container and let them submit unauthorized withdrawals. He said it was a complex attack and not a single “one-click” action. Binance said it found no evidence of a wallet private key leak and will publish a detailed post-mortem once the facts are verified.
The blockchain analytics firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis attributed the hack to North Korea’s TraderTraitor unit, TRM with high confidence. TRM said several features of the attack, including preparations made well before the theft, match earlier North Korea-linked heists such as the $1.5 billion Bybit hack last year. It estimated about $6.36 billion left Binance wallets across 10 blockchains, most within about 20 minutes. No one has claimed responsibility, and law enforcement has not confirmed the attribution.
Teng told customers their money is safe and that Binance is covering every loss. Co-founder Yi He said the exchange would cover all hacking losses. Binance suspended deposits and withdrawals, and said it expects withdrawals to resume within 48 hours, after it completes a security revamp of the withdrawal service and its addresses.
Bitcoin fell more than 4% to below $78,000 on Friday as the incident weighed on cryptocurrency markets, CNBC reported.
This report draws on information from Reuters, CNBC, the BBC and Forbes.