Binance Suspends Transactions After It Is Targeted in Biggest-Ever Cyber Heist— WSJ
By Sam Kessler and Vicky Ge HuangBinance suspended transactions Thursday as the exchange investigates the biggest cyber heist in history."It does look like a hack on Binance," Changpeng Zhao, Binance's founder, said in a post on the social-media platform, X. "User funds are safe."Binance said late Thursday that the hack totaled around $6.3 billion.Zhao, who no longer leads the world's biggest crypto exchange but remains its largest shareholder, added that stablecoin providers Tether and Circle had moved quickly to freeze some $1.7 billion in stolen assets. Binance later revised that number to $3 billion across several different assets.Cybersecurity research firms TRM Labs and Pangolin Intelligence said the heist appears to have been conducted by North Korea's TraderTraitor hacking group, which has been behind many of the largest crypto hacks in recent memory. "This was absolutely North Korea," said Nick Carlsen, a senior investigator on the Global Investigations team at TRM, who told the Journal he worked with Pangolin Intelligence to correlate hackers' blockchain activity with information they gathered on other DPRK-linked attacks.Binance said it has suspended all deposits and withdrawals as its team conducts security checks, freezes funds and works with law enforcement.Binance said in a statement on X that an initial investigation into the incident suggested it involved "a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop," which allowed the attacker to "submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.""We are working closely with our law enforcement partners to confirm the identity of the criminals and bring them to justice," a Binance spokesman said.When stablecoin providers freeze stolen funds, hackers cannot move, transfer or cash out of those specific tokens. They essentially blacklist the hacker's crypto wallet address, trapping the tokens inside the wallet before hackers can convert them into other cryptocurrencies or launder them through a mixer.As cybersecurity researchers tallied up the damage following the heist, they were quick to notice that it dwarfed any previous incident of its kind.Thursday's hack amounted to the "largest bank heist in human history," said Ari Redbord, TRM's global head of policy.The previous record for biggest cyber heist was set in 2025, when North Korea-linked hackers stole $1.5 billion from crypto exchange Bybit."Our teams are aware of reports of a potential security issue and are actively investigating," a Binance spokeswoman said after Zhao initially posted about the incident on X. "Rest assured that user funds are completely safe."Zhao's post came mere hours after the prediction-markets platform Polymarket disclosed its own hack, where at least $2.6 million in user funds were drained from the company's accounts.Crypto exchanges are tempting targets for hackers. Unlike stock exchanges, which facilitate trading but don't actually hold securities on behalf of investors, many crypto exchanges store cryptocurrencies for their customers. As a result, many exchanges have suffered heists in which hackers extract customers' funds from the exchanges' crypto wallets in the hope of cashing out."This is a huge hit in absolute dollar terms," said Kevin March, co-founder of JPEG Trading. He expects the loss to be manageable for Binance given the exchange's $1.2 billion insurance fund and the swift move by Tether and Circle to freeze stolen assets.Binance.US, the exchange's U.S. arm, said it isn't affected by the security incident.Write to Sam Kessler at [email protected] and Vicky Ge Huang at [email protected]