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Binance hack: the biggest heist in history
Record theft highlights the vulnerability of the cryptocurrency industry to online hacks
Investors withdrew $3.6 billion (£2.7 billion) of assets from the cryptocurrency exchange Binance when it reopened for business after what is thought to be the biggest financial theft in history.
Hackers stole around $6.3 billion on Thursday, though Binance claims to have “replenished” around 90% of that into customer accounts.
It took “no more than 30 minutes” to move the “eye-watering” sum, said the Financial Times. The funds may prove “impossible to recover”, said CoinDesk, renewing the “debate over the safeguards exchanges need to prevent a security breach from becoming a financial catastrophe”.
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Crypto exchanges like Binance, which has more than 300 million registered users worldwide, are especially “tempting targets” for hackers, said The Wall Street Journal. While traditional stock exchanges don’t hold the securities of their investors, and only facilitate trades, crypto exchanges often store their customers’ cryptocurrencies. Hackers can therefore directly access customers’ funds from the exchanges’ crypto wallets.
Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said on X that the security breach could have originated via a “compromised” laptop belonging to one of the company’s engineers. However, this would not have been a “single ‘one-click’ action”, but a “more complex attack process”.
Who was behind it?
Crypto analysis firm TRM and other researchers have attributed the attack to a North Korean hacking unit TraderTraitor, based on “robust on and off-chain intelligence”. This has yet to be confirmed.
“If North Korea is proven to be the culprit, it would be little surprise to US law enforcement officials and private experts,” said CNN. TraderTraitor has been “behind many of the largest crypto hacks in recent memory”, said WSJ, including the previous record theft of $1.5 billion last year from Bybit, another major cryptocurrency exchange.
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What will happen next?
Binance said on X it has frozen more than $3 billion (£2.2 billion) – around half – of the stolen crypto and promised to cover all money lost in the hack from existing funds.
Freezing the crypto means the hackers “cannot move, transfer or cash out” their takings, essentially “trapping the tokens inside the wallet before hackers can convert them into other cryptocurrencies or launder them”, said WSJ.
Recovering the losses may prove more problematic. This requires a “separate legal process” involving court orders or a seizure warrant, Ari Redbord, from TRM, told CNBC. Recovering Bitcoin in particular – which accounts for around a quarter of the haul – is “more challenging because they have no issuer that can directly freeze the assets”, said Eric Jardine, from Chainalysis. “There is no standard recovery timeline. A technical freeze may happen quickly, while returning funds can take months or years.”
Will Barker joined The Week team as a staff writer in 2025, covering UK and global news and politics. He previously worked at the Financial Times and The Sun, contributing to the arts and world news desks, respectively. Before that, he achieved a gold-standard NCTJ Diploma at News Associates in Twickenham, with specialisms in media law and data journalism. While studying for his diploma, he also wrote for the South West Londoner, and channelled his passion for sport by reporting for The Cricket Paper. As an undergraduate of Merton College, University of Oxford, Will read English and French, and he also has an M.Phil in literary translation from Trinity College Dublin.
