NEW YORK — Hackers stole more than $6 billion in cryptocurrency from Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, on Thursday, in what investigators described as the largest such heist on record, according to CNN.
By Thursday night in the United States, a group of cryptocurrency firms had managed to freeze about $3 billion of the stolen money as they raced to track it across digital wallets, CNN reported. The figure frozen is an early tally from that effort and may change as tracing continues.
Binance said late Thursday that its first investigation pointed to an engineer’s laptop. Through that laptop, the company said, an attacker gained access to a service container and was able to submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. Binance said it had temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while security checks were completed, revoked the affected address authorization, and engaged law enforcement and blockchain intelligence partners to trace and recover funds.
The company said it would cover all losses from its own funds and an emergency assets fund, adding that user funds are safe. Changpeng Zhao, who co-founded Binance in 2017 and remains its largest shareholder, said on X that the incident appeared to be a hack and that he expected user funds to be fully covered.
Three tracing firms pointed to North Korea. Crypto-tracing firm TRM Labs attributed the heist to an elite North Korean hacking unit, based on what it called robust on and off-chain intelligence. Pangolin Intelligence, based in Singapore, said it also believed a North Korean unit was behind the attack, and Chainalysis told CNN it had high confidence North Korea was behind the hack. CNN said it had reached out to North Korea’s mission at the United Nations for comment. Pyongyang has previously denied hacking allegations, and the attribution in this case is an assessment by private firms, not a finding by a court.
The scale stunned traders. Aravind Srinivasan, head of systematic over-the-counter business at market maker GSR, told Reuters it was the biggest hack in history. The previous record, according to CNN, was the $1.5 billion theft from the exchange Bybit, which investigators also blamed on North Korean hackers. United States and South Korean officials have long said North Korean hacking teams are a key source of revenue for the sanctions-battered regime, and United Nations reports have linked Pyongyang-linked hackers to billions of dollars stolen from banks and crypto firms in recent years.
Prices of Bitcoin and Ether first fell sharply after news of the breach, then regained some losses to trade about 2 to 3 percent lower by midday Friday in Hong Kong, CNN reported. What happens next will turn on how much of the remaining money can be frozen before it is moved through laundering networks, and on what Binance and investigators disclose about how the engineer’s laptop was compromised. For the full report, see CNN’s account of the Binance heist.
