North Korean hackers are blamed for stealing $6.3bn from crypto exchange Binance in 20 MINUTES in the biggest heist ever
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.Around $3bn of the $6.3bn stolen from Binance has already been frozen, with Tether and Circle locking more than $2.3bn in stablecoin assets connected to the breach.
The elite North Korean hacking unit TraderTraitor siphoned $6.3bn from Binance wallets across 10 blockchains in just 20 minutes starting at 20:05 GMT on Thursday, blockchain intelligence firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis confirmed with "high confidence." Binance said a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop may have been the entry point, allowing attackers to breach a service container and submit unauthorised withdrawals. Bitcoin dropped more than 3% to a six-week low of $76,368 and Coinbase shares slid 4.8% as markets reacted in Asian trading.
Binance says it has frozen around $3bn of the stolen funds on-chain, leaving $3.3bn still unaccounted for.
Co-founder Yi He pledged the exchange will "cover all hacking losses" and said withdrawals are expected to resume within 48 hours.
The previous record crypto heist was $1.5bn — also attributed by the FBI to TraderTraitor — stolen from the Bybit exchange in February 2025.
