After record 6.3 billion crypto heist, Binance says hackers stole funds but user assets are safe

Binance outlines its response

Binance said in updates posted to X that user funds remain safe and about $3 billion of the stolen assets have been frozen. It has suspended deposits and withdrawals, and revoked authorization for the affected address.

The company said it would cover losses from the breach. Alongside an emergency reserve fund valued at around $1.3 billion, Binance has set aside more than $6.34 billion in company funds for the incident, including $5 billion in the affected tokens.

Investigation finds further breaches

Binance initially suspected a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer. The company later said its investigation had found additional points of breach, and described the attack as complex.

Attribution and scale of theft

Blockchain analysis firms TRM and Chainalysis attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean cybercrime group with a record of targeting cryptocurrency exchanges. Binance has not publicly identified who carried out the hack.

The theft is four times larger than the previous record, the $1.46 billion stolen from Bybit last year. TRM said most of the Binance theft happened in about 20 minutes.

Crypto theft concerns grow

Binance also suffered a breach in 2019, when $40 million in crypto assets, valued at the time, were stolen. The latest incident follows several large crypto heists disclosed by companies in September.