Bitcoin stolen from Binance tops Tesla’s holdings and is over twice El Salvador’s reserve
The 18,270 BTC haul is worth about $1.4 billion and comes within 442 coins of SpaceX’s disclosed holdings. Blockchain investigators link the attack to North Korea.
Binance has reported a security incident involving the theft of approximately $6.3 billion in funds, which This Day describes as looking to be the largest crypto heist in history. The exchange has suspended all deposits and withdrawals and stated that about $3 billion in funds had been frozen following the hacking. While initial investigations suggested a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop may have been the entry point, Binance co-CEO Richard Teng stated that subsequent investigations uncovered additional points of breach and that the incident was not carried out by a single person.
Teng also noted that hackers used a self-destruct mechanism to destroy traces, making the investigation more difficult.
Blockchain intelligence firm TRM assessed with high confidence that the attack was carried out by North Korea’s hacking unit TraderTraitor, which investigators have linked to the Lazarus Group. CoinDesk reported that an 18,270 BTC haul, worth about $1.4 billion, was part of the theft. In response to the breach, Binance said it has set aside more than $6.34 billion in company funds to cover stolen assets and is actively buying various crypto tokens, maintaining that user funds are safe.
The hack impacted cryptocurrency markets on Friday, with the price of Bitcoin dropping 5% to $76,800 in New York afternoon trading. Other market reactions included Coinbase falling 12% and Robinhood decreasing by 7.8%.
Brief written by urgent.news from CoinDesk, This Day, Joy Business, MyJoyOnline Ghana — 4 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
