Hackers stole over $6 billion in cryptocurrency on Thursday, shattering the record for the largest such heist as multiple investigators pointed the finger at North Korea.
As of Thursday night in the US, a team of cryptocurrency firms had managed to freeze about $3 billion of the stolen loot amid a frenetic battle with the hackers to find and control the digital money.
The hackers broke into digital wallets held at Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.
Binance said late Thursday that its initial investigation indicates that the hack went through an engineer’s laptop, “which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.”
Binance said it would “cover all losses” from “the company’s funds” and an emergency assets fund, adding “user funds are safe.” The crypto exchange also said it had “temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while security checks are completed; revoked the affected address authorization; [and] engaged law enforcement and blockchain intelligence partners to trace and recover funds.”
Analysts were shocked by the amount of money impacted.
“It’s the biggest hack in history,” Aravind Srinivasan, head of large crypto market maker GSR’s systematic OTC business, told Reuters.
Crypto-tracing firm TRM Labs attributed the heist to an elite North Korean hacking unit, “based on robust on and off-chain intelligence.”
Pangolin Intelligence, another blockchain-tracking firm based in Singapore, said it also believed that a North Korean hacking unit was behind the heist.
“Analyzing the on-chain activity related to this hack and correlating with information gathered from previous known incidents [involving the North Korean cyber unit]” led to the attribution, said an analyst with Pangolin Intelligence, who did not want to be named for privacy reasons.
“I think the cat and mouse game has barely begun yet,” the Pangolin Intelligence analyst told CNN, adding that North Korea was likely poised to tap a network of money laundering organizations to try to cash out the stolen funds.
Chainalysis, another crypto-tracking company, said it was monitoring stolen funds “moving across multiple blockchains,” including Bitcoin and Ethereum. A Chainalysis spokesperson told CNN the firm had “high confidence” North Korea was behind the hack.
CNN has reached out to North Korea’s mission at the UN for comment. Pyongyang has previously denied hacking allegations.
CNN has requested comment from the FBI, as well as the US Secret Service, which also investigates cybercrime. In past investigations of big crypto hacks, the FBI has had an on-call team of analysts that worked to freeze some of the money.
If North Korea is proven to be the culprit, it would be little surprise to US law enforcement officials and private experts. North Korean hackers were blamed for the previous record-high crypto hack, when they allegedly stole $1.5 billion from Bybit, another major cryptocurrency exchange. In that case, the attackers stole an amount equal to a significant portion of North Korea’s reported annual gross domestic product in a matter of minutes.
North Korea’s formidable hacking teams are a key source of revenue for the nuclear-armed, sanctions-battered regime, according to current and former US and South Korean officials. Pyongyang-linked hackers have stolen billions of dollars from banks and cryptocurrency firms in the last several years, according to reports from the United Nations and private firms.
A 2023 CNN investigation spotlighted how the South Korean intelligence service worked with private crypto-tracking experts to seize about $1 million in cryptocurrency that North Koreans had stolen from a victim.
The is a breaking news story, more to come.
