Binance estimates security incident affected $6.3 billion in crypto

The transfers were first tracked on October 29, when assets moved from wallets attributed to Binance to addresses controlled by an attacker. Blockchain analysis firm TRM Labs estimates that about $6.36 billion moved across ten blockchains, much of it within roughly 20 minutes. Binance’s own estimate puts the total impact at about $6.3 billion.

The numbers describe the value of assets transferred, not a confirmed final loss to customers. Binance says it will cover losses from its SAFU fund and company funds. It has temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while it checks systems, revoked affected address authorizations, and is working with law enforcement and blockchain partners.

Binance’s initial investigation suggests that a DevOps engineer’s laptop may have been compromised, giving an attacker access to a service container and a way to submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. The company says it has found no evidence of a wallet private key leak. It has not yet published a full technical post-mortem, so the precise method remains under investigation.

TRM Labs separately attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking unit, saying its assessment was based on on-chain and off-chain intelligence. That is the firm’s attribution; Binance has not publicly confirmed who carried out the attack.

Binance said roughly $3 billion in affected assets had been frozen on-chain. TRM’s more detailed tally puts freezes by Tether, Circle, Ripple, World Liberty Financial and the Arbitrum Security Council at about $2.7 billion at its stated cutoff. The totals differ because the response was continuing and the estimates use different timestamps and asset categories.

The attack put pressure on crypto prices and drove a wave of forced closures in leveraged trades. CoinDesk, citing CoinGlass, reported about $1.53 billion in liquidations over 24 hours on Friday, including roughly $1.29 billion in long positions. That figure is time-sensitive and higher than the $600 million cited in some early reports.