North Korea's 'elite' hackers are the prime suspect in the $6.3bn Binance crypto 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 cybercrime unit TraderTraitor stripped $6.36 billion from Binance wallets across ten blockchains in around 20 minutes on Thursday evening, with TRM Labs and Chainalysis attributing the attack "with high confidence" to the Pyongyang-backed group. Trump told reporters from the Oval Office "we don't know" if North Korea is responsible, adding "we're looking at that." Binance co-CEO Richard Teng confirmed the company will cover all customer losses, backed by a reserve of more than $6.34 billion set aside for that purpose. The FBI and US Secret Service are now working with Binance on the investigation.
Investigators believe hackers may have gained entry through a single DevOps engineer's compromised laptop, with insiders not ruling out an inside job.
Crypto firms managed to freeze around $3 billion in assets, but attackers still control $2.4 billion "beyond any issuer's reach," TRM Labs warns.
The haul equals roughly a fifth of North Korea's entire GDP, with crypto theft estimated to generate half the regime's foreign currency income.
