Kim Jong Un's elite hackers are blamed for a record $6.3bn heist that drained crypto giant Binance in 20 MINUTES
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.
A compromised laptop belonging to an engineer served as the entry point for the largest financial theft in history, with North Korea's elite TraderTraitor unit emptying Binance's wallets across ten blockchains — the bulk of the funds vanishing in a frantic 20-minute window late Thursday. Blockchain analytics firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis both attributed the attack with high confidence to the same Pyongyang-backed group responsible for last year's $1.5bn Bybit raid. The FBI and US Secret Service are now working alongside Binance as the exchange scrambles to recover assets and restore withdrawals within days.
Binance co-CEO Richard Teng revealed attackers deployed a 'self-destruct mechanism' to erase their traces, and that investigators have since identified multiple additional breach points beyond the original compromised laptop.
Stablecoin issuers succeeded in freezing roughly $3bn, but the remaining $3bn lies beyond any issuer's reach — experts regard it as permanently unrecoverable.
Crypto theft is now estimated to finance around half of North Korea's missile programme, with Kim Jong Un overseeing a state-trained hacker army of approximately 8,400 operatives, identified and recruited from childhood.
