Binance hit by record $6.3 billion crypto hack, scrambles to freeze funds

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, confirmed Thursday that it had been hacked in a $6.3 billion cyber heist that blockchain investigators are blaming on North Korea.

The company pledged to cover all losses and said it is temporarily suspending deposits and withdrawals while its team works to address the hack.

Early Friday, the company said it had managed to freeze just under half of the stolen assets, or around $3 billion.

According to the company’s initial investigation, the breach “may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.”

Binance said it has found “no evidence of any wallet private key leak” and said it will “share a detailed technical post-mortem once the investigation is complete and the facts are fully verified.”

The hackers began removing funds from Binance wallets Thursday, with assets worth roughly $6.36 billion moving across 20 blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron, the XRP Ledger and Solana, in about 20 minutes.

Blockchain analytics firms Chainalysis and TRM Labs both said they had a high degree of confidence that North Korean hackers were behind the heist and that they are tracking the funds.

The company regularly publishes what it calls a “proof of reserves,” showing that its wallets hold enough assets to match every customer’s balance. Its most recent snapshot showed reserves of more than 100% across the listed assets, meaning customers should be fully backed.

Although the hackers are believed to have hit some of these reserve wallets, Binance said it will make up the difference using emergency funds and its own money. The company said it will publish an updated proof of reserves “once the remediation is complete.”