The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange has been hit by a record hack, putting hundreds of millions of people’s money at risk. Binance said on Friday that suspected hackers had taken around $6.3 billion, which could make it the biggest ever crypto heist. A blockchain analysis firm blamed North Korea’s TraderTraitor hacking group for the breach—as Binance suspended withdrawals with the value of cryptocurrencies plummeting.
Kathryn Westmore, the director of financial crime at UK Finance, told Newsweek: “TraderTraitors [is] believed to be a state-sponsored North Korean hacking group who have carried out other hacks on other platforms, although not at the scale of the Binance hack.” She said that although the hackers attacked Binance, users’ own security on their personal devices would have played a part in whether their wallets were targeted. Westmore said: “It can be as complex and attack as you like, but it ultimately depends on a person’s device becoming compromised, whether with malware or something else. So many hacks or cyber attacks start with a person doing it or doing something which ends up infecting their device and the network.” Responding to today’s attack, Binance said its initial investigations of the “security incident” indicated that the laptop of a software engineer at the company may have been compromised, which allowed hackers into the platform’s systems and ultimately to green-light withdrawals.
Binance was hit with a crypto heist in 2022, when a hacker artificially created 2 million BNB tokens, amounting to around $570 million. Although the platform stepped in, the attacker was still able to take around $115 million. After this latest huge hack, Blockchain company TRM Labs said it had “high confidence” North Korean hackers were behind the attack.
It said: “TRM attributes the attack to TraderTraitor, North Korea’s elite hacking unit. We make this judgment with high confidence.” The group added: “We base this assessment on robust on and off-chain intelligence sources. The FBI named the same group as responsible for the $1.5 billion Bybit hack in February 2025.
It’s definitely a bad look. And this is one after another.” BNB, formerly known as Binance Coin, dropped by more than 4.7 percent. Bitcoin fell approximately 4.5 percent to $76,368 before recovering to $78,434.
TRM believes the attack took around 36 hours to prepare, when the main operator got “three small withdrawals from Tornado Cash, a service that obscures where crypto comes from, starting the morning of October 28.” Then the hacker started the attack, using code to attack two wallets. The group tested the code on a third wallet before funnelling the money used back to their accounts. In the space of just four minutes between 8:05 p.m. and 8:09 p.m., five Binance hot wallets sent 233.46 million of the cryptocurrency XRP to one of the hackers’ addresses.
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