North Korean hackers are blamed for a record $6.3bn crypto heist that drained Binance in just 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.
North Korean elite hacking unit TraderTraitor is blamed with "high confidence" by two blockchain intelligence firms, TRM Labs and Chainalysis, after attackers compromised Binance's signing infrastructure — the system that authorises transactions — and emptied wallets across ten blockchains. The FBI and US Secret Service are now working with Binance on the investigation. Stablecoin providers have managed to freeze around $3bn, leaving roughly $2.4bn still beyond any issuer's reach. Co-CEO Richard Teng says the attack involved multiple "points of breach," not a single compromised laptop as initially thought.
Binance has set aside over $6.34bn in company funds to cover every customer loss, with withdrawals expected to resume within two days.
US officials have previously said TraderTraitor cybercrime funds roughly half of North Korea's missile programme.
Bitcoin shed more than 3% to touch a six-week low and Coinbase shares slid 4.8% as markets reacted to the breach.
