Binance initially reported that an engineer’s laptop had been compromised, enabling unauthorized withdrawals, but later indicated that additional breach vectors were identified.
Richard Teng, Binance’s co‑CEO, stated that the attack involved multiple actors who employed advanced techniques, including a self‑destruct mechanism, to obscure their activities.
On Friday, the firm announced that it had frozen roughly $3 billion of the stolen assets in cooperation with law‑enforcement agencies, intelligence companies, and industry partners.
The investigation remains ongoing, the company noted. The U.S. Secret Service said it is working around the clock with private‑sector partners to identify, freeze, trace, and recover the funds stolen from Binance.
Two leading blockchain‑analytics firms assert that strong evidence points to the North Korean state‑backed group Lazarus, also known as TraderTraitor, as the probable perpetrators.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) indicated that North Korea was behind a $1.5 billion theft from the Bybit exchange in the previous year.
North Korea has consistently denied any involvement in these attacks.
Founded in China in 2017, Binance enables users to buy, sell, and trade digital assets and serves an estimated hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
Crypto is a digital asset that exists only in electronic form and is accessed through digital wallets or computers.
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