FBI blames North Korea for record crypto heist

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has accused North Korean hackers of stealing approximately $6.3 billion from Binance in the largest cryptocurrency heist on record. US President Donald Trump has stressed that Pyongyang's involvement remains unproven.

In an alert published on Saturday, the bureau attributed the October 29 attack on the world's largest crypto exchange to TraderTraitor, a group it claimed is related to North Korean malicious cyber activity and which it also blamed for last year's $1.5 billion theft from Bybit.

Trump's Doubts

Trump stopped short of endorsing that scenario when questioned by reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Saturday. "We don't know if it's North Korea," he said, adding that investigators were still examining the case.

Binance's Response

Binance's preliminary investigation suggested that attackers accessed an internal system through a compromised employee laptop, allowing them to submit unauthorized withdrawals. The company said it had found no evidence that the private keys used to control its cryptocurrency wallets had been leaked.

The exchange suspended withdrawals after discovering the breach and worked with law enforcement to freeze roughly $3 billion in stolen assets. Binance says it has since replaced about 95% of the stolen assets using company resources.

Industry Pattern

There have been several other major penetrations of cryptocurrency platforms. Last week, prediction-market platform Polymarket disclosed a breach involving a compromised third-party provider, with at least $2.6 million taken from user accounts.

In September, hackers stole around $388 million from the Bitget exchange. Attacks on the Drift Protocol and Kelp DAO platforms in April resulted in losses of $285 million and $292 million, respectively. In February 2025, suspected North Korean hackers stole around $1.5 billion from Bybit.