The biggest crypto heist in history: FBI points to North Korea behind the Binance attack

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, suffered the biggest crypto heist on record on October 29. Within a few hours, attackers drained between $6.3 and $6.4 billion in assets from the exchange's internet-connected "hot" wallets. On October 31, the FBI confirmed that North Korea was behind the attack.

What happened?

According to Chainalysis, funds began leaving Binance wallets in the late afternoon of October 29. On the Ethereum side, the attacker used valid signatures to make a Binance wallet run code the attacker had written, then emptied the wallet. According to Elliptic, the attack affected 11 different blockchains. The stolen funds are being moved automatically across thousands of addresses; stablecoin companies managed to freeze between $2.4 and $2.8 billion of them.

Analytics firms had linked the attack to the North Korea-linked TraderTraitor group within the first hours. The FBI, the US Secret Service and the criminal investigation unit of the tax agency confirmed this in a joint statement, publishing more than 600 Ethereum addresses and asking crypto services not to transact with them.

Binance said it will not pass the loss on to users. The exchange announced that it had replaced roughly 90 percent of the stolen value from its own treasury, emergency reserves and insurance funds, and that it plans to reopen the withdrawals it had paused on Sunday, November 1. Bitcoin fell about 3 percent after the news.

Why does it matter?

The previous record was the roughly $1.46 billion stolen from the Bybit exchange in February 2025. The Binance heist is more than four times larger; Elliptic also counts it as the largest single theft of any kind on record. A single attack may have nearly doubled the total crypto stolen by North Korea-linked groups in recent years. The incident shows that even the biggest exchanges can lose billions of dollars through a single weak point. We told the story of the days when Bitcoin was spent on two pizzas in our Bitcoin Pizza Day article.