Binance says North Korean hackers stole $6.34 billion in technical breach
The cryptocurrency exchange has pledged to cover all financial losses following the October 29 attack involving fake job interviews.
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance reported on Tuesday that a cyberattack linked to North Korea resulted in the theft of $6.34 billion in digital assets. According to a report by The Economic Times, the breach occurred on October 29 after hackers used malicious software and fake job interviews to access internal systems.
The attackers gained unauthorised access to an internal wallet signing service, allowing them to move assets outside the standard withdrawal process. The breach included the transfer of 18,270 Bitcoin, 233.46 million XRP, 970,500 SOL, 44.2 million OP tokens, and 2,961.9 Ether.
Binance stated it has frozen or intercepted about $2.85 billion of the stolen assets. The company said it has set aside more than 100 per cent of the funds needed to compensate for the losses and had replenished 98 per cent of the affected token assets as of October 31.
The investigation revealed the attack was prepared over several months. In June, a DevOps engineer downloaded a tampered software package, and in September, another engineer was targeted through a fake job interview on a recruitment platform. The engineer was instructed to download a coding assignment that contained malware.
On October 20, the attackers used a compromised computer and an internal AI tool to access two more engineers. On October 29, they used stolen credentials to deploy a container and execute a script targeting the wallet signing infrastructure.
Binance apologised for the disruption and uncertainty caused to users and the industry. The company noted that the final unauthorised transfer was completed at 23:56 UTC on October 29, after which it cleared the malicious delegation from the affected wallet.