Crypto giant Binance reports $6.3 billion potential ‘security incident’

Binance reported late Thursday it suffered a “security incident” involving as much as $6.3 billion in cryptocurrency, and it has frozen affected assets and plans to cover any losses after a full investigation.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange said the episode “may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.

“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,” the company said. “The estimated total impact sits at around $6.3B. We have worked with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets, with ~$3 billion frozen on-chain so far.

It promised to make amends if any losses are discovered.

“Binance will cover all losses from the SAFU fund and the company’s funds. User funds are safe. We will also publish an updated Proof of Reserves once the remediation is complete,” it said.

Binance said it took several precautions, including:

• temporarily suspending deposits and withdrawals while security checks are completed;
• revoking the impacted address authorization;
• engaging police and blockchain intelligence partners to trace and recover funds.