Crypto exchange Binance has confirmed today that they are currently investigating what is believed to be the biggest crypto hack in history—estimates peg this to around $5.7 billion in users’ crypto funds taken out of wallets on the platform, this Thursday. Binance co-founder Yi He said in a social media post that the crypto exchange had suspended deposits and withdrawals for now. “User funds are safe, Binance will cover all hacking losses.”
Binance’s Yi confirms the exchange is working with law enforcement agencies (though she didn’t specify if it’s a multi-country coordination) alongside security checks. “We will share a full post-mortem once the investigation is complete. Please rely only on official Binance channels for updates,” she says. Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange, in terms of daily trading volume.
Binance has shared an initial investigation assessment, indicating the security incident may have been as a result of a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorised withdrawal transactions across user accounts. “We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak. We will share a detailed technical post-mortem once the investigation is complete and the facts are fully verified,” they say, in a post on X.
Private keys remaining secure and un-compromised will be important for Binance to resume services at some point in the future.
They are estimating the total cost of the stolen cryptocurrency at around $6.3 billion. “We have worked with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets, with ~$3 billion frozen on-chain so far. Binance will cover all losses from the SAFU fund and the company’s funds,” they say.
The hacking comes after a wave of high-profile cyberattacks, AI agents deploying automated actions, and data-breaches in the past couple of weeks leading to cybersecurity experts dubbing it “Black October”. Earlier, HT had explained how the internet is under attack, and there are very few answers available as to what consumers and businesses need to do.
Also Read: The internet is under attack, and we have very few answers
Hours earlier, decentralised predictions platform Polymarket confirmed it was facing a cyberattack, which forced them to pause operations. Research platform Hudson Rock indicates that the Polymarket hack was a result of a third-party website monitoring tool called DebugBear facing its own ongoing cybersecurity incident.
Two other major cryptocurrency platforms Tether and Circle have since frozen crypto accounts on their exchanges, to limit potential losses for customers. The value of crypto that is being safeguarded this way isn’t known though Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says around $1.6 billion worth has been frozen “related to a potential Binance exchange hack”. Neither platform indicates if they are also under attack.
If these estimates hold true, the Binance hack would surpass the Bybit hack of 2025, when hackers linked to the North Korean region, stole around $1.5 billion worth of crypto. Glassnode, a digital asset advisory firm, estimates that Binance’s hack is valued at around $5.3 billion in crypto value.
The very nature of cryptocurrency, which is unregulated and doesn’t draw its value in a way defined currencies and metals do, making it vulnerable to volatility if a large volume of withdrawals or deposits happens. Binance is yet to confirm the origin of this attack, or the value of cryptocurrencies that have been stolen.
Prices of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana, three popular cryptocurrencies, have dropped as much as 5% since the announcement of the cyberattack.