Cryptocurrency exchange Binance said digital assets worth $6.3 billion were affected by a hack. The company called the incident serious and said it would cover all user losses.
Analysts believe it could be the largest crypto theft in history, surpassing the 2025 Bybit attack, which resulted in $1.5 billion being stolen.
Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said the initial investigation pointed to a compromised engineer’s laptop. Through it, the attacker gained access to a service container and submitted unauthorized withdrawal transactions.
The company later said it had identified additional points of breach. No evidence of a wallet private key leak had been found at the time of the statement. Withdrawals are temporarily disabled, while deposits remain available. Binance said it would publish a full technical report once the investigation is complete.
Several analytics firms have linked the attack to a North Korean group. Chainalysis said it had “high confidence” that a North Korea-linked group was involved. TRM Labs also attributed the attack with high confidence to the TraderTraitor group, also known as the Lazarus Group, and noted similarities with earlier incidents, including the Bybit hack.
Check Point described the losses reported by Binance as the largest crypto theft on record. Western security agencies have previously reported that funds stolen by North Korean hackers were used to support the country’s nuclear and missile programs. North Korean authorities have denied involvement in such attacks in the past.
As of the morning of October 30, Binance and its partners had frozen about $3 billion in stolen funds. Tether froze more than $1.567 billion in USDT, while Circle blocked over $800 million in USDC. Ripple, World Liberty Financial and several other companies also took part in the freezes.
About 74.56 million ARB tokens and 8,425 ETH were frozen through a temporary contract update on Arbitrum. The attacker also borrowed 19,762 WETH (around $45 million) on Aave. The protocol restricted new positions, while repayments, withdrawals and liquidations remained available. Binance said it would cover the losses using its SAFU reserve fund and its resources.
Binance was founded in 2017 and has well over 300 million registered users. In 2024, the exchange reported holding over $160 billion in assets under custody. The US-based platform Binance.US said it was not affected by the hack. Coinbase also confirmed that its systems had not been compromised.
The news impacted the markets. Bitcoin briefly fell by more than 4%, while Ethereum and Solana also declined. More than $1.5 billion in liquidations took place across the crypto market in just 24 hours. Binance said it was working with law enforcement to identify those responsible.
