WASHINGTON (The Thursday Times) — The FBI has formally blamed North Korea for the theft of more than $6 billion in cryptocurrency from Binance, the largest crypto heist on record, and urged exchanges and blockchain services to freeze the stolen funds as Pyongyang’s hackers race to launder them.
In an alert issued on Saturday, the bureau said the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was responsible for the theft of more than $6 billion in virtual assets from the exchange “on or about October 29, 2026”. It attributed the attack to the North Korean group it calls TraderTraitor, the same unit behind the $1.5 billion theft from the Bybit exchange in February 2025.
The FBI said that, working with the US Secret Service and the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigation unit, it had seen the hackers converting the stolen assets mainly into Ether, and expected them to move the money through decentralised finance platforms and instant swap services in further stages of laundering.
It urged THORChain node operators, RPC node operators, instant exchanges, DeFi services, blockchain analytics firms and other virtual asset providers to block transactions with or derived from the addresses the hackers are using, and published more than 100 Ethereum addresses it said were holding or had held the stolen funds. “The FBI maintains its commitment to protecting the virtual asset community by identifying, mitigating, and disrupting North Korea’s illicit cybercrime and virtual asset theft activities,” the alert said.
Binance said on Saturday it had replaced 90 per cent of the stolen funds from its own reserves and planned to reopen withdrawals on Sunday, and that about $3 billion of the stolen assets had been frozen with the help of law enforcement and partners. The exchange initially traced the breach to a compromised engineer’s laptop before finding “additional points of breach”.
North Korea has been accused for years of using cyber theft to fund its weapons programmes in defiance of international sanctions, with hacker units recruited from its top universities and run by its Reconnaissance General Bureau spy agency.
