Crypto giant Binance says it has replenished 90% of the $6.3bn stolen by suspected North Korean hackers in record heist
Binance halted all withdrawals after a hack through a single engineer's laptop drained an estimated $6.3bn — surpassing the previous record $1.5bn Bybit breach in 2025.Kim Jong Un, whose country's TraderTraitor unit carried out the Binance raid using access gained through a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, according to investigators.
Binance co-CEO Richard Teng confirmed the remaining 10 percent comprises less-liquid tokens that may take longer to source, but pledged the exchange will cover every dollar of losses out of its own pocket. The full $6.3bn theft took roughly 20 minutes, with hackers deploying a self-destruct mechanism to erase their traces after breaching several entry points, including a compromised engineer's laptop.
Withdrawals for Binance users are set to resume on Sunday 1 November.
The US Secret Service is working 'around the clock' with private partners to freeze and recover funds.
Blockchain firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis both say North Korea's elite TraderTraitor unit carried out the attack with 'high confidence'.
