Experts blame North Korea's elite hackers for the $6.3bn Binance crypto raid billed as the 'largest heist in history'
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.
Two blockchain intelligence firms, TRM Labs and Chainalysis, have attributed Thursday's raid on Binance to North Korea's TraderTraitor hacking unit "with high confidence." The attackers drained $6.36bn across six blockchain networks, much of it within a single 20-minute window. Binance co-CEO Richard Teng says the company has set aside over $6.34bn to make every affected customer whole. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, President Trump said his administration is examining the hack, adding that 'we don't know' yet whether North Korea was behind it.
Investigators believe the breach originated on a DevOps engineer's laptop, with 'additional points of breach' subsequently identified.
Roughly $3bn in stolen assets has been frozen so far, though TRM Labs warns that $2.4bn remains out of reach of any issuer.
Crypto theft is thought to account for approximately half of North Korea's foreign currency earnings, with the funds channelled into Kim Jong Un's nuclear weapons programme.
