Kathmandu. Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has suffered its biggest cyber attack ever. According to Binance, around $6.3 billion worth of digital assets have been affected. In the preliminary investigation, it was seen that the attacker entered the internal system and withdrew unauthorized funds through the access to the laptop of one of the company’s devops engineers.
Binance said it was able to block approximately $3 billion worth of potentially affected assets with the help of its blockchain partners. A large part of the remaining amount is said to be still in the control of the attackers. The company has promised that the user’s money is safe and will bear all the losses of the affected customers from its own resources and from the ‘Secure Asset Fund for Users’ (SAFU).
According to the initial investigation, the attacker managed to access the devops engineer’s laptop and make unauthorized withdrawal transactions through the service container. Binance says it has not yet found any evidence of a private key leak of any wallet. During the security test, the company has temporarily stopped the withdrawal service and also canceled the access to the affected address.
No one has formally claimed responsibility for the attack. But blockchain analysts TRM Labs and Chainalysis have shown a high probability of its connection to the North Korean state-backed hacking group ‘TraderTrader’. Earlier, the same group was also linked to the 2025 theft of $1.5 billion worth of crypto from Bybit.
Binance’s blockchain partners and stablecoin issuers have frozen large amounts of assets following the attack. According to Binance, around $3 billion worth of digital assets have been frozen with the help of companies including Tether and Circle and other blockchain organizations.
While Binance’s global platform is affected, Binance US, which is operated separately for US users, is said to be unaffected. Although the deposit and withdrawal services were stopped for some time after the attack, the company said that the service will be resumed after a security test.
The cryptocurrency market has also come under pressure after the incident. International media reported that the price of major digital assets, including Bitcoin, has fallen. The incident at Binance is seen as the biggest heist ever in the cryptocurrency space and has raised new questions about the security of digital assets and the credibility of centralized exchanges.