The largest crypto theft on record

A North Korean hacking unit seems to be responsible for stealing over $6 billion in crypto assets from Binance, the world's biggest exchange, according to several blockchain sleuths and analysis firms. Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs said an attacker moved approximately $6.36 billion out of Binance wallets on ten blockchains, most of it in about 20 minutes, which would make the hack the largest cryptocurrency theft on record.

TRM attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, which it described as North Korea's elite hacking unit, with high confidence based on on-chain and off-chain intelligence. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT said the attacker was likely Lazarus, the wider North Korean group of which TraderTraitor is a subunit, and Chainalysis chief executive Jonathan Levin said his firm assessed the hack was likely done by TraderTraitor, citing links to a previous hack.

What Binance says

Binance said it worked with blockchain partners to freeze roughly $3 billion in affected assets, and that it was beginning to recover assets for users. Deposits were unaffected, withdrawals have been suspended and are expected to resume in the next day or two, and the exchange says it will cover all losses.

Binance traced the attack vector to a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, but a later investigation uncovered additional points of breach. The company says it is working with law enforcement to confirm the criminals' identity, and declined to comment on the North Korea ties beyond that cooperation.

The FBI is involved, attribution unconfirmed

The FBI told Nextgov/FCW it is aware of the incident and is engaged with government and industry partners to understand the scope, evaluate potential impacts and coordinate investigative steps, but it did not attribute the intrusion to North Korea. That distinction matters: the North Korea link is currently an assessment by blockchain analysis firms, not a confirmed law-enforcement finding.

The scale dwarfs the previous record: in February 2025, Bybit suffered a $1.5 billion hack that the FBI blamed on North Korea and TraderTraitor. If the Binance attribution holds, the same group has now carried out a theft more than four times larger.

Sources: CoinDesk | Nextgov/FCW | WHRO