Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, suspended withdrawals after hackers stole $6 billion from its digital wallets in what is being described as the biggest financial heist on record.
Axios reports that Binance co-founder Yi He announced on X that the exchange had suspended deposits and withdrawals following the suspected breach. “User funds are safe,” she wrote, adding, “Binance will cover all hacking losses.” Multiple reports put the amount stolen from the exchange at $6 billion in cryptocurrency.
Co-CEO Richard Teng also commented on the issue, saying, “Bottom Line — your money is safe, and we’re covering every loss.”
Binance published an official disclosure of the incident in a post on X. According to the exchange, “Binance’s initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.”
As for the money, the company wrote, “The estimated total impact sits at around $6.3B. We have worked with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets, with ~$3 billion frozen on-chain so far.” That leaves roughly half the estimated total still out there
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, suspended withdrawals after hackers stole $6 billion from its digital wallets in what is being described as the biggest financial heist on record.
Axios reports that Binance co-founder Yi He announced on X that the exchange had suspended deposits and withdrawals following the suspected breach. “User funds are safe,” she wrote, adding, “Binance will cover all hacking losses.” Multiple reports put the amount stolen from the exchange at $6 billion in cryptocurrency.
Co-CEO Richard Teng also commented on the issue, saying, “Bottom Line — your money is safe, and we’re covering every loss.”
Binance published an official disclosure of the incident in a post on X. According to the exchange, “Binance’s initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.”
On wallet security, Binance was blunt: “We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak.”
As for the money, the company wrote, “The estimated total impact sits at around $6.3B. We have worked with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets, with ~$3 billion frozen on-chain so far.” That leaves roughly half the estimated total still out there.
Binance also moved to reassure customers they won’t be the ones footing the bill. “Binance will cover all losses from the SAFU fund and the company’s funds. User funds are safe. We will also publish an updated Proof of Reserves once the remediation is complete,” the company said.
The exchange listed three immediate steps it took in response: “As an immediate precaution, Binance has: temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while security checks are completed; revoked the affected address authorisation; engaged law enforcement and blockchain intelligence partners to trace and recover funds.”
It also promised more detail later. “We will share a detailed technical post-mortem once the investigation is complete and the facts are fully verified,” the company said, adding, “Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this issue safely and thoroughly. We are working closely with our law enforcement partners to confirm the identity of these criminals and bring them to justice.”
The breach lands in the middle of what’s being called “Black October,” a stretch marked by a wave of cyberattacks, data breaches and bugs surfaced by AI tools. It also echoes last year’s theft at the Bybit exchange, where North Korea-linked hackers stole about $1.5 billion in crypto. North Korea has built hacking and scamming into an industrial-scale operation, running crypto heists alongside a scheme that tricks Western companies into unknowingly hiring North Korean workers.
A team of cryptocurrency firms has already frozen about $3 billion of the stolen funds, even as the rest keeps moving. Chainalysis, one of the firms tracking the money, said it was watching funds shift “across multiple blockchains,” including bitcoin and ethereum. A spokesperson for the firm told CNN it had “high confidence” that North Korea was behind the hack.
Two other tracing firms reached the same conclusion. TRM Labs attributed the theft to an elite North Korean hacking unit, saying the assessment was “based on robust on and off-chain intelligence” and noting that “several features of this attack match earlier North Korea-linked heists.”
Singapore-based Pangolin Intelligence agreed. An analyst there told CNN the firm’s conclusion came from “analyzing the on-chain activity related to this hack and correlating with information gathered from previous known incidents.” The same analyst warned that getting the rest of the money back won’t happen fast: “I think the cat and mouse game has barely begun yet.”
