Binance said late on Thursday that approximately $6.3 billion was impacted, which its founder described as “like a hack.”
The company said it worked with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets, and roughly $3 billion was frozen.
The cryptocurrency exchange added that it had temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while security checks are completed.
TRM, in a post on its website Thursday, attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, which it described as North Korea’s elite hacking unit. “We make this judgment with high confidence,” the firm said.
“An attacker moved approximately USD 6.36 billion out of Binance wallets on ten blockchains, most of it in about 20 minutes,” TRM said. That would make the hack the largest cryptocurrency theft on record, it said.
In February last year, another cryptocurrency exchange Bybit suffered a $1.5 billion hit when it was hacked. The FBI said North Korea and TraderTraitor were responsible for the hack, the AP reported.
Blockchain analysis company Chainalysis also believed the Binance hack was “likely done by DPRK group TraderTraitor,” its co-founder and CEO Jonathan Levin wrote on X. DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea’s official name.
In December 2022, South Korea’s spy agency said North Korean hackers had stolen an estimated 1.5 trillion won ($1.1 billion) in cryptocurrency and other virtual assets in the past five years, more than half of it in 2022 alone. It said North Korea’s capacity to steal digital assets was considered among the best in the world.