Hackers steal 6 point 3 billion in crypto; Binance suspends withdrawals

Withdrawals halted after breach

Binance disclosed that $6.3 billion worth of crypto funds had been stolen from its platform. The exchange said in updates on X that user funds were safe and that roughly $3 billion in affected assets had been frozen.

Deposits and withdrawals were suspended after the incident. Binance also revoked authorization for the affected address. The company said an attacker used access to a service container to submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.

Binance pledges to cover losses

The exchange said it would cover losses arising from the hack. It has an emergency reserve of around $1.3 billion, based on its last valuation, and said it reserved more than $6.34 billion in company funds for this incident.

Binance said $5 billion of that amount is already held in the same token assets that were affected. The company said it is coordinating with law enforcement as it investigates the breach.

Investigation finds more breach points

Binance’s initial investigation pointed to a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer. The company later said its inquiry uncovered additional points of breach, describing the attack as complex.

Co-CEO Richard Teng said the incident did not rely solely on one engineer’s permissions or a single action. He added that investigators had not assigned responsibility to an individual and had found no evidence that a wallet private key was leaked.

Analysts identify suspected group

Blockchain analysis firms TRM and Chainalysis attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean cybercrime group with a history of targeting crypto exchanges. Binance has not publicly identified who was responsible.

The breach is described as four times larger than the previous record, when $1.46 billion was stolen from Bybit last year. TRM said most of the theft took place in about 20 minutes.

Binance also suffered a security breach in 2019, when crypto assets worth $40 million at the time were stolen. The latest incident follows several large crypto thefts reported in September.