Kim Jong Un's hacker army is blamed for the $6.3bn Binance raid dubbed 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.
North Korean hacking unit TraderTraitor has been identified with "high confidence" by blockchain analytics firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis as the group behind Thursday afternoon's $6.3bn Binance breach, which was carried out in approximately 20 minutes and which experts describe as the biggest theft ever recorded. The FBI and US Secret Service are now cooperating with Binance on the investigation, while Trump told reporters in the Oval Office "we don't know" if Pyongyang is responsible but confirmed his administration is investigating.
Binance co-CEO Richard Teng confirmed hackers used a "self-destruct mechanism" to cover their tracks, with investigators uncovering "additional points of breach" beyond the initially identified compromised engineer's laptop.
Stablecoin providers managed to freeze around $3bn, though approximately $2.4bn has moved beyond any issuer's reach — Binance has ringfenced more than $6.34bn of its own funds to cover all customer losses.
TraderTraitor previously pulled off the then-record $1.5bn Bybit hack in 2025; US officials say North Korean cybercrime funds roughly half of Kim Jong Un's missile programme.
