Binance reveals hackers used a FAKE job interview and its own AI tool to pull off the record $6.3bn crypto heist
The theft, traced to a compromised engineer's laptop, has been formally attributed by the FBI to TraderTraitor, believed to be part of North Korea's Lazarus Group.
North Korean state hackers spent four months infiltrating Binance before draining £4.7bn in crypto last October, with the FBI attributing the attack to elite unit TraderTraitor — the group also identified as the Lazarus Group — calling it the most audacious financial theft in history. Binance apologised, saying "this should not have happened," and pledged to cover all customer losses from the breach.
The hack began in June when an engineer downloaded a tampered AI coding tool; a second engineer was then lured into fake interviews with a fictitious company's fake CEO.
Chinese money-laundering crews moved in within 20 minutes of the theft, deploying around 12,000 digital wallets — at a rate of one fresh wallet every 25 seconds — to channel funds toward North Korea's weapons programme.
Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un's sister, dismissed the FBI's accusations as "a trite provocation," but North Korea's Lazarus Group was previously blamed for the then-record $1.5bn Bybit hack in 2025.
