FBI Blames North Korean Group for $6.3 Billion Binance Theft and Asks Crypto Industry to Block Stolen Funds

The FBI and U.S. Secret Service have alleged that North Korean hackers were behind the theft of more than $6.3 billion from cryptocurrency platform Binance last week. Both agencies named the TraderTraitor hacking group and asked the crypto industry to help stop the stolen funds from being laundered.

According to the agencies, the attackers have spent days moving and swapping the funds through thousands of seemingly automated transactions. The aim is to hide the source of the money and convert it into coins that can be cashed out as regular currency. The FBI said the group is mainly converting the assets into Ethereum, and expects them to be laundered further through decentralised finance and instant swap services. It published a list of addresses used to hold the stolen funds and asked exchanges and other operators to block transactions linked to them. Blockchain security experts say about $3 billion has been frozen, though several platforms argued that, being decentralised, they cannot stop transactions.

Binance, the world's biggest crypto exchange, shut down for several days and used reserve funds to replace the stolen coins. It first pointed to a compromised engineer's laptop, but now says investigations found "additional points of breach". CEO Richard Teng said the attacker used a self-destruct mechanism that wiped tooling and traces, making investigation harder.