Behind the Scenes of Crypto’s Biggest Nightmare: a Record-Breaking Cyber Heist

A facts-only brief, written by a local AI model from this article in The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2026. It may contain mistakes, and it is not the article: the full story is at wsj.com.

North Korean hackers stole at least $6.3 billion from the cryptocurrency exchange Binance on Thursday afternoon, marking the largest cyberattack of the period dubbed “Black October.” The breach was detected around 11:20 p.m. in Abu Dhabi, and within 20 minutes, the stolen amount had exceeded $6 billion. Binance paused all withdrawals during the incident, a move that triggered social media panic and comparisons to the collapse of FTX. The company stated that an initial investigation found a DevOps engineer’s laptop was compromised, enabling unauthorized withdrawals, though it later noted other infrastructure may also have been affected.

Background

• Cybersecurity firms TRM Labs and Pangolin Intelligence linked the attack to North Korea’s state-sponsored TraderTraitor unit, which was also responsible for the $1.5 billion ByBit hack in 2025.
• According to Chainalysis, suspected North Korea-linked hackers accounted for nearly 89% of reported crypto hack losses this year.
• Binance co-CEOs Yi He and Richard Teng worked through the night to coordinate with stablecoin issuers like Tether and Circle to freeze stolen assets, though hackers ultimately escaped with approximately $2.4 billion in un-freezable crypto assets via the Aave lending platform.
• Binance founder Changpeng Zhao assured users that their funds were safe and that the company would cover the losses, despite the significant financial impact.

Read the full article at wsj.com

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