Binance Hit by Record $6.3 Billion Hack; Withdrawals Paused as North Korea Link Emerges

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has suffered what is now being described as the biggest theft in the history of digital assets. The exchange estimates the total impact of Thursday’s attack at about $6.3 billion, while blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis put the amount taken at close to $5.9 billion at the time of the breach.

According to Binance’s preliminary investigation, the intruder appears to have got in through the compromised laptop of a DevOps engineer. That access may have allowed the attacker to reach an internal service container and push through withdrawal transactions that the company never authorised. Binance says it has found no sign that the private keys of its wallets were leaked.

Withdrawals frozen, losses to be covered

Binance has suspended withdrawals and says they will restart only once the security issue is fixed. Co-CEO Yi He said on X that the exchange would absorb “all hacking losses”, drawing on its SAFU emergency fund, worth around $1 billion in bitcoin, and on company money. Founder Changpeng Zhao also told users their funds were safe.

A large part of the stolen money has already been locked. Tether said it had frozen more than $1.57 billion in USDT, and Circle said it had frozen over $800 million in USDC. By late Thursday, Binance said roughly $3 billion in total had been frozen.

Fingers point at Pyongyang

Blockchain investigators were quick to name a suspect. TRM Labs said it traced the attack with “high confidence” to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking unit, while independent sleuth ZachXBT pointed to the Lazarus Group. Blockaid’s chief executive said the methods matched known North Korean operations.

Markets shaken

The news rattled crypto markets. Bitcoin slid nearly 5% to below $77,000, ether lost close to 6% and Binance’s own BNB token fell about 8%. Even so, the stolen sum is only about 4% of the roughly $144 billion held on the platform, according to DefiLlama.

For Indian crypto investors, many of whom hold assets on global exchanges, the episode is another reminder to spread holdings, use cold wallets for long-term savings and follow official exchange updates rather than social-media rumours.

Featured image: A Bitcoin token on a laptop keyboard. Photo: Satheesh Sankaran, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (source).

Sources

• CoinDesk – Binance loses over $6 billion in the largest crypto hack to date