By Sumayya
Binance, which is the biggest cryptocurrency trading platform in the world, has stopped users from taking out their money. This happened after thieves broke into its digital wallets and stole $6 billion in what looks like the biggest cryptocurrency robbery ever.
The company stated on Friday that it has started getting back the stolen property. They are also continuing to work with police and digital tracking companies to find the rest of the missing money.
An early check showed that the theft happened through an engineer’s personal computer. Binance said late on Thursday that this allowed the thief to get into a computer system and make illegal withdrawals. Digital proof on the blockchain shows that the attack started in North Korea, according to several companies that track cryptocurrency.
A group of cryptocurrency businesses managed to freeze about $3 billion of the stolen money during a fast-moving fight with the thieves to find and control the digital cash.
The co-leader of Binance, Richard Tend, said on the social media site X that the attack was not a simple, one-click action. Instead, it was a complicated process. The investigation has not blamed any single person yet and has not found any proof that secret wallet passwords were leaked.
Binance stated that it will pay back all the missing money using the company’s own funds and an emergency safety fund. They added that “user money is safe.” The trading platform said it stopped people from putting in or taking out money for a short time so that security checks could be finished and partners could track and recover the funds. The company expects that users can start taking out their money again by Sunday morning.
A tracking company named TRM Labs blamed the robbery on a top-level North Korean hacking group. They said this was based on strong digital information and pointed out that several parts of this attack look just like earlier robberies connected to North Korea.
Pangolin Intelligence, another digital tracking company based in Singapore, said it also believed a North Korean hacking group did the robbery. An analyst from Pangolin Intelligence, who asked to keep their name secret for privacy, said they came to this conclusion by studying the digital movements from this theft and comparing them to older, known attacks.
The analyst told CNN that the game of cat and mouse has just started. They added that North Korea will likely use a network of illegal money-hiding organizations to try to turn the stolen digital funds into real cash.
Chainalysis, another tracking business, said it is watching the stolen funds move across different digital systems, including bitcoin and ethereum. A speaker for Chainalysis told CNN that the company is very sure North Korea caused the hack.
CNN has asked North Korea’s office at the United Nations for a comment. The country has denied hacking claims in the past. In past checks into big cryptocurrency thefts, the FBI had a team of experts ready to help freeze some of the money.
The FBI said in a statement on Friday that it knows about the incident and is working with public and private groups to understand how big the problem is, see the effects, and plan the right steps for the investigation.
A speaker for the US Secret Service, which also checks digital crimes, said their investigators are working day and night with private businesses. This includes working with Circle, the company that makes the digital coin USDC which is backed by the US dollar. They are working to find, freeze, trace, and recover the money stolen from Binance on Thursday. They are also working closely with the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and police partners to find the digital thieves and bring them to justice.
If it is proven that North Korea did this, it will not surprise US police or private experts. North Korean hackers were blamed for the last record-breaking cryptocurrency theft, when they allegedly stole $1.5 billion from Bybit, which is another large trading platform. In that incident, the thieves stole an amount of money equal to a large part of North Korea’s total yearly economic value in just a few minutes.
According to current and former officials from the US and South Korea, North Korea’s powerful hacking teams are a main source of money for the government, which has nuclear weapons and faces heavy economic punishments. Groups linked to North Korea have stolen billions of dollars from banks and cryptocurrency businesses over the past few years, according to reports from the United Nations and private companies.
A 2023 investigation by CNN showed how the South Korean intelligence service worked with private digital tracking experts to take back about $1 million in cryptocurrency that North Koreans had stolen from a victim. Unlike platforms where people trade regular stocks, cryptocurrency platforms usually hold digital money on behalf of their users. This makes them easier targets for hackers and theft, especially because there are not many laws to watch over this relatively new business.
Binance was started in 2017 by a Canadian citizen named Changpeng Zhao, and it became the world’s biggest cryptocurrency trading platform within one year of starting.
However, Zhao left his job in 2023 after admitting he was guilty of breaking anti-money laundering laws in the US. He was ordered to spend four months in a federal prison and was forgiven by President Donald Trump in October last year.
Zhao no longer runs the business but still owns the most shares in it. He said on X that he expects users’ money to be completely paid back by the platform. He argued against anyone saying the opposite during a disagreement on X with Elon Musk.
The prices of bitcoin and ether, which are the most traded digital currencies, dropped fast after the news of the Binance break-in, but they recovered some of those losses to trade about 2% to 3% lower by the middle of the day on Friday in Hong Kong.
