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 Korea's elite TraderTraitor hacking unit gained entry through a Binance DevOps engineer's laptop, leveraged that foothold to compromise the exchange's signing infrastructure, and then activated a self-destruct mechanism to wipe its tracks. Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said Friday that investigators had uncovered several additional entry points, suggesting the operation was far more sophisticated than initially believed. The FBI and US Secret Service are now assisting Binance, which has reserved more than $6.34 billion in company funds to cover every affected customer's losses in full.
Stablecoin providers managed to freeze around $2.8 billion, but approximately $2.4 billion has moved beyond any issuer's reach — and is likely unrecoverable.
US officials have previously stated that North Korean cybercrime finances roughly half of Pyongyang's missile programme, placing attacks of this kind squarely in the realm of national security.
Bitcoin dropped over 3% to a six-week low and Coinbase shares fell 4.8% as Asian markets opened Friday and absorbed the news of the breach.
