🚨🇺🇸 One hacked employee laptop just cost Binance an estimated $6.3 billion, the biggest crypto theft on record
Binance says attackers likely got in through a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop and pushed through unauthorized withdrawals, and it has frozen deposits and withdrawals while it investigates and promised to cover every customer's loss.
About $3 billion has been frozen so far, most of it in stablecoins after Tether and Circle locked the tokens within hours, but roughly $2.4 billion in bitcoin and ether is still in the attacker's wallets, and those have no company that can hit pause.
Bitcoin dropped more than 4% to under $78,000. The previous record, the Bybit hack in 2025, was $1.5 billion.
The lesson is uncomfortable for an industry that sells itself as unhackable: the money that could be stopped was the money controlled by a company, and the money that got away was the part nobody controls.
Getting it back now depends on the thieves trying to cash out through an exchange that cooperates, which can take months or years.
Source: CNBC / Writer: Daniel
Binance says attackers likely got in through a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop and pushed through unauthorized withdrawals, and it has frozen deposits and withdrawals while it investigates and promised to cover every customer's loss.
About $3 billion has been frozen so far, most of it in stablecoins after Tether and Circle locked the tokens within hours, but roughly $2.4 billion in bitcoin and ether is still in the attacker's wallets, and those have no company that can hit pause.
Bitcoin dropped more than 4% to under $78,000. The previous record, the Bybit hack in 2025, was $1.5 billion.
The lesson is uncomfortable for an industry that sells itself as unhackable: the money that could be stopped was the money controlled by a company, and the money that got away was the part nobody controls.
Getting it back now depends on the thieves trying to cash out through an exchange that cooperates, which can take months or years.
Source: CNBC / Writer: Daniel
