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There are a number of factors that have drawn people to cryptocurrencies, including a system that’s designed to make it virtually impossible for people to steal what’s yours. However, hackers in North Korea figured out how to infiltrate the world’s biggest exchange while claiming what is believed to be the largest heist ever staged.
It’s been more than 15 years since a mysterious figure known as “Satoshi Nakamoto” penned a paper outlining the vision for what became Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that was mined for the first time in 2009.
What initially seemed like a bit of a fad primarily reserved for a niche community of technologically savvy futurists eventually burst into the mainstream as Bitcoin and other forms of crypto experienced a massive boom toward the start of the 2020s, and as things currently stand, the entire cryptocurrency industry boasts a $2.6 trillion market cap.
There are a number of platforms you can turn to in order to manage your assets, and none of them do more business than Binance, the exchange that lists more than 900 different coins and handles close to $15 billion worth of transactions each day.
However, it’s been targeted by hackers who made off with a truly massive score.
North Korean hackers made history after stealing more than $6 billion from Binance
Most people initially stored crypto on a physical hard drive known as a wallet, and the only way to access the asset was through a lenghty private key that was impossible to randomly guess to the point where some people who’ve misplaced theirs have spent years attempting to recover a potentially lost fortune.
However, digital wallets that are stored online have become an increasingly popular option, but they are inherently more susceptible to being targeted by cybercriminals on the hunt for a potentially massive payday.
According to The New York Times, the potential downsides of going that route have been firmly highlighted by an incident involving Binance, which was founded in China in 2017 en route to becoming the biggest exchange in the crypto space.
On Thursday, the company confirmed it had been infiltrated in an operation that’s been linked back to “North Korea’s elite hacking unit,” which staged what was described as a “complex hack” involving multiple “points of breach.”
The group stole digital assets that were initially valued at $6.3 billion, making it the largest-ever crypto heist and seemingly the biggest single theft of tangible currency in history (a $1.5 billion hack of Bybit in 2025, which was also traced back to North Korea, previously topped that list).
Binance users do not have the privilege of having their holdings covered by the FDIC or similar agencies. However, the company has pledged to cover all the losses after temporarily freezing withdrawals and deposits and hopes to resume business as normal within the next couple of days.