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Binance’s $6.3bn hack: one laptop, and a warning for every bank

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Binance’s $6.3bn hack: one laptop, and a warning for every bank

Security, fraud, custody and markets specialists who sent reaction to The Fintech Times agree on the lesson, and most of them say it is not only crypto’s to learn.

Attackers drained Binance hot wallets on ten blockchains on the afternoon of 29 October, US Eastern time. Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs puts the total at about $6.36 billion and links the attack to North Korea, as does Chainalysis. That is more than four times the previous record, the roughly $1.5 billion taken from Bybit in February 2025.

Binance’s initial investigation pointed to a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop that gave the attacker access to a service container, from which unauthorised withdrawal transactions were submitted. The exchange said it found no evidence that a wallet private key had leaked. Stablecoin issuers moved quickly: Tether and Circle froze around $3 billion of the stolen funds.

Binance suspended deposits and withdrawals for about 45 hours, pledged to cover all losses from its Secure Asset Fund for Users and its own balance sheet, and by 1 November said it had replenished about 95 per cent of the affected assets. 64 billion, according to figures reported by CoinDesk . Binance published a fresh proof of reserves snapshot on 2 November and has scheduled another for 4 November. Bitcoin fell below $80,000 as the news spread and was trading around $77,000 on 2 November.



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