Binance has begun recovering some of the $6.3 billion in assets stolen in what the exchange is treating as the largest crypto heist on record, according to Business Insider.
The exchange said Friday it had "uncovered additional points of breach," revising an earlier account that pointed to a single compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer.
Investigators at TRM Labs said attackers compromised signing infrastructure used to authorize transactions, letting them issue instructions that drained affected wallets; Binance said it found no evidence that wallet private keys were leaked.
The attacker withdrew most of the funds within about 20 minutes, according to TRM's analysis of public crypto wallets.
Chainalysis said it observed unprecedented laundering activity, with funds circulated between addresses using automation rather than moved directly onward.
Binance said user funds remain safe and that it has reserved over $6.34 billion of company funds to cover losses, drawing on its Secure Asset Fund for Users, which has reportedly held a reserve of about $1 billion in bitcoin.
Binance and blockchain partners have frozen roughly $3 billion in assets so far, and the company expects to restore withdrawals within 45 hours.
TRM and Chainalysis both attributed the attack with high confidence to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking unit the FBI previously linked to the $1.5 billion Bybit breach last year.
Bitcoin fell about 3.2% and Ethereum about 3.8% Friday morning as the hack added to a month that has also seen a trading pause at Polymarket and a malware incident affecting up to 5,000 users of Cursor's Claude Code tool.
Binance cofounder Changpeng Zhao thanked "industry friends and even competitors" for assistance, adding: "Elon, I have a lot of respect for you, but bad time to troll. Please stop."
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