Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, says about US$6.3bn in digital assets was hit in a security breach that started with an engineer’s laptop, BBC News and Al Jazeera reported on Friday 30 October.
Binance disclosed the breach on Thursday 29 October, US time. In eastern Australia it was already Friday 30 October.
The BBC put the amount at US$6.3bn (£4.7bn) and said the incident has been described as the “largest hack in history”. Binance said it will “cover all losses”, the BBC reported. About half the assets have been frozen with the help of other platforms.
The figures are not final. Both the loss and the frozen total were still moving on Friday 30 October.
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How It Happened
Initial checks suggest an attacker made unauthorised withdrawals after compromising an engineer’s laptop, according to the BBC and Al Jazeera.
The funds appear to have been moved from “hot wallets”, ABC News reported. These are wallets connected to the internet and used for everyday trading.
Binance told the ABC in a written statement: “We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak”.
Thirty or 40 tokens were affected, including bitcoin and the stablecoins USDT and USDC, according to crypto watchers cited by the ABC.
Binance suspended all deposits and withdrawals, Al Jazeera reported.
“Safety first: withdrawals are currently disabled until the environment is confirmed to be secure,” co-chief executive Yi He said in posts, according to the BBC.
“Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this issue safely and thoroughly,” Binance said in a statement to Al Jazeera. It will share a “detailed” technical post-mortem once investigations are complete, the outlet reported.
The Freeze
About US$3bn has been frozen, according to Al Jazeera. The BBC put it at about half.
Two stablecoin issuers did some of the freezing. Tether froze around US$1.6bn and Circle more than US$800m, the BBC reported.
“There are different layers of defence,” Chris Berg of RMIT told ABC News. “Stablecoin providers can freeze those funds.”
The North Korea Claim
Two analytics firms, TRM Labs and Chainalysis, attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking unit, the BBC reported.
TRM said it made that assessment with “high confidence”, according to Al Jazeera. Investigators link the unit to the Lazarus Group.
The attribution is the firms’ own. Binance did not respond to BBC questions about North Korea.
“When North Korea steals at this scale, the money funds weapons proliferation and other destabilising activity. That makes this a global security issue, not just a crypto theft,” Ari Redbord of TRM told Al Jazeera.
The previous record was the US$1.5bn Bybit theft in February 2025, also attributed to the North Korean-linked Lazarus group, ABC News reported.
Criminals stole US$2.87bn in nearly 150 crypto hacks in 2025, according to TRM’s 2026 Crypto Crime Report, Al Jazeera reported.
Markets and Users
Bitcoin fell more than 4% after the alerts, the BBC reported.
Binance has more than 300 million registered users. Binance.US says it is not affected, according to the BBC.
“We are working closely with our law enforcement partners to confirm the identity of these criminals and bring them to justice.” That line came from a Binance statement carried by the BBC and ABC News.
“Any assets held at a centralised exchange are only as safe as the exchange itself, and the larger the exchange’s holdings, the larger a target it becomes,” Sean Foley of Macquarie University in Sydney told Al Jazeera.
Earlier security coverage, including the PHP2Shell patches, is in prw’s Technology archive.
What Binance Owes Its Users
Binance has promised to cover all losses, the BBC reported. On Friday 30 October, withdrawals were disabled until the environment was confirmed to be secure, according to Yi He’s posts.
Binance puts the incident at about US$6.3bn. About US$3bn of it was frozen as of Friday 30 October, Al Jazeera reported, and the post-mortem is still to come.
Sources: BBC News, “Crypto giant Binance hit by ‘largest hack in history'”, 30 October 2026 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwg7xp8kx4v5o); ABC News, “Billions stolen as Binance targeted in largest cryptocurrency hack in history”, 30 October 2026 (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-30/largest-cryptocurrency-hack-billions-stolen-binance/107327732); Al Jazeera, “Binance says $6.3bn stolen in biggest crypto heist in history”, 30 October 2026 (https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/10/30/binance-says-2-54bn-in-crypto-funds-frozen-amid-potential-security-issue)
Photo: Christopher Bowns, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Server cabinets line an aisle in a university data centre in Virginia, pictured in 2008. An illustrative image only: it has no connection to Binance or the attack.
