Binance just lost $6.3 billion in crypto's biggest hack. It started with one engineer's laptop
The world's largest crypto exchange confirmed the theft on 29 October and paused withdrawals on several networks. About $3 billion has been frozen, Binance says its SAFU fund and own money will cover customers, and blockchain analysts point to North Korea.
Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, lost around $6.3 billion in a hack on Thursday 29 October. That makes it the largest crypto theft on record, more than four times the roughly $1.5 billion taken from Bybit in February 2025. The figure comes from Binance’s own incident announcement, and withdrawals remain paused on several networks while it investigates.
The way in, as Binance tells it so far, was ordinary. An attacker compromised the laptop of a DevOps engineer, used that foothold to reach a service container, and from there pushed through withdrawals nobody had approved. The company says it has found no evidence that any wallet private key leaked. The investigation is still open, so treat that account as preliminary.
What has been stopped
A good chunk of the money did not get far. Binance says about $3 billion has been frozen, $2.3 billion of it in the USDT and USDC stablecoins. Tether froze more than $1.57 billion in USDT and Circle more than $800 million in USDC, according to the two companies’ chief executives on X.
Customers, Binance insists, will not lose a cent. Losses will be covered by SAFU, the emergency fund it set up in 2018 for exactly this, and by company money, a promise co-CEO Yi He repeated on X. Founder Changpeng Zhao, no longer running the business but still its largest shareholder, was among the first to say publicly that it had been hacked.
Who did it
Binance has not named anyone. Blockchain analysts moved faster: TRM Labs says with “high confidence” that the trail leads to TraderTraitor, a North Korea-linked group, and other investigators name Lazarus, the wider cluster of hackers associated with Pyongyang. Those are third-party attributions, not confirmed by any authority.
The market hit
Prices took it on the chin the same day. Bitcoin fell 4.8% to below $77,000, ether dropped 5.7% and BNB, the exchange’s own token, lost 8%. If you follow bitcoin as a risk asset, it goes straight onto our running markets tracker.
The most useful advice right now is Binance’s own: ignore links and messages claiming to come from the company that ask for account details. Scammers tend to arrive right behind the thieves.
By Beatriz Mota
Image: PiggyBank Canada / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
