Crypto giant Binance attempting to recover $6.3bn stolen in hack linked to North Korea
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Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, says it has frozen around half of the funds stolen in a "complex" hack, after $6.3bn (£4.7bn) was accessed in what is believed to be a record heist.
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The firm said $3bn of its stolen digital assets had been secured - but many were still in the hands of unidentified hackers. It initially thought an engineer's laptop had been compromised, allowing unauthorised withdrawals, but later said the attack was wider.
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Several analytics firms have linked the hack, which eclipses a $1.5bn (£1.12bn) heist on the Bybit exchange in 2025, to a North Korean hacking unit.
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The US Secret Service said it was "working around the clock" "to identify, freeze, trace, and recover" stolen funds.
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America's lead federal agency for investigating financial crimes added that it would "identify the cyber criminals responsible and bring them to justice", while Binance also said it was working with the FBI.
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While Binance said its US-facing exchange was unaffected, the US would still have jurisdiction to investigate the hack and help track down stolen funds - an effort which generally involves a global law enforcement effort.
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The hack also involved some US-linked assets, such as stablecoins Tether and Circle – cryptocurrencies pegged to the dollar.
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Binance told its users "your money is safe, and we're covering every loss".
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It had initially suspended all deposits and withdrawals - but then said in an update that "deposits remain unaffected".
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Who could be behind the Binance hack and what we know so far Binance's co-CEO Richard Teng said: "This was not carried out by one person.
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Our initial investigation suggested that the security incident may have involved a compromised laptop, however our subsequent investigation has uncovered additional points of breach." Teng also describes how the hackers used "a self-destruct mechanism that destroyed tooling and traces as they went, making it more difficult for us to trace and investigate".
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Initially, the company had indicated the breach "may have started with a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop" but later statements have pointed to a broader breach.
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The Binance hack spooked cryptocurrency markets on Friday.
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The price of Bitcoin was down 5% to $76,800 in Friday afternoon trading in New York. Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase was down 12% as investors also reacted to earnings results in which the firm reported revenue slightly below expectations.
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Robinhood, a financial services company that trades in cryptocurrency, was down 7.8%. Binance, which was founded in China in 2017, allows users to trade digital assets and is estimated to have more than 300 million registered users worldwide.
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The company said in 2024 that it had more than $160bn in assets under its custody.
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A lot of the fear right now from Binance users - and the crypto industry at large - is whether or not Binance will actually be capable of covering this enormous financial loss.
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The company has said repeatedly that customer funds will be covered and that the firm is strong enough to weather the storm.
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But crypto history watchers have been pointing out online that this is exactly the kind of message that FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried gave before his crypto exchange collapsed in 2022, leading to huge losses for customers and the industry.
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Several experts have warned customers not to regard Binance's promise to cover losses as legally binding and said they may need to pursue litigation to recover them.
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Daniel Tunkel, of the London-based Edwin Coe law firm, said that would "come down to what [customers] have been promised in their contracts", and "where Binance can be sued for non-performance, if it comes to it".
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Binance has been subject of regulatory scrutiny around the world.
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Meanwhile, AI-powered investigations company TRM Labs said that several elements of the attack resembled earlier North Korean-linked incidents, including the Bybit hack.
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In the last five years the crypto industry has been beset by enormous losses from hackers.
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In nearly all cases investigators have blamed hackers from North Korea, pointing to the infamous Lazarus Group - also know as TraderTraitor.
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The names refer to clusters of cyber criminals accused of working directly for the regime. Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm, said it had "high confidence" that a North Korean is linked to the hack.
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North Korea is an impoverished country with very little industry and heavy international sanctions and experts say the regime uses cyber crime as a way to bring money in.
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North Korea has always denied this, but the wealth of evidence from cryptocurrency flow analysis and insider interviews from defectors is compelling.
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It makes North Korea likely to be the only nation that uses hacking as a way to raise public funds.
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