Binance Suffers 'Largest-Ever Hack' Worth KRW 8.4 Trillion

TRM Labs: "North Korea behind the hack"
Hacker accessed servers through engineer's compromised laptop
Bitcoin falls to a one-month low

Bitcoin prices plunged to their lowest level in a month amid estimates that the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, suffered losses of approximately $6.3 billion (about KRW 8.4 trillion) in a hack.

On October 29 local time, Binance said, "Our initial investigation suggests that the hacker likely accessed service containers through a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer and then attempted unauthorized withdrawal transactions." It added, "The estimated losses currently stand at approximately $6.3 billion."

Binance said it had coordinated with partners in the blockchain industry to freeze the assets involved, and that approximately $3 billion had been frozen on-chain so far.

Binance stressed, "Users' funds are safe, as we plan to fully cover all losses using our insurance fund (SAUF) and the company's own funds."

Binance said it had suspended all deposits and withdrawals while security checks were underway and revoked access permissions for the affected addresses.

According to Bloomberg, blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs described the incident as the largest cryptocurrency theft in history and pointed to North Korea as being behind it.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said on X, formerly Twitter, that "more than $1.5 billion in Tether has been frozen." Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire also confirmed that the company had "received a report of the exploitation of a vulnerability at Binance and frozen coins worth $800 million."

Earlier, Investing.com reported, citing cryptocurrency analytics firm Glassnode, that assets worth approximately $5.3 billion (about KRW 7.1 trillion) had been stolen in the hack.

According to Glassnode, the stolen assets included $1.66 billion in Tether (USDT), 17,985 Bitcoin (worth approximately $1.45 billion), and $763 million in Circle (USDC), among others.

Jensen Seifert of Bloomberg Intelligence expressed strong concern over the recent spate of security incidents, saying, "Hot wallet hacks are not new in the cryptocurrency market, but an incident of this scale at the world's largest exchange is extremely serious."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.