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Cryptocurrency exchanges are rushing to beef up security and reassure customers their funds are safe after hackers stole a record $6.3 billion from the world’s largest digital assets site.
Binance is still investigating how attackers managed to steal $6.3 billion from its exchange on Thursday evening. President Donald Trump said the United States was “monitoring” the heist, which analysts suspect was carried out by hackers linked to North Korea.
Binance’s initial investigation found that an engineer’s laptop had been compromised, but it later added that other “breach points” had been discovered.
Jeff Lunglhofer, head of security at Coinbase, said the largest U.S. exchange had “made some adjustments to our cold storage systems purely out of an abundance of caution.”
US site Kraken said it was monitoring the situation and reassured users that its services were operating normally, while Gemini had placed “additional alerts and restrictions” on potential fund movements.
In an update Friday evening, Binance said it had “contained the compromised infrastructure, revoked affected permissions, and implemented additional controls to prevent further unauthorized activity.”
Withdrawals from the exchange remain suspended and Binance said it was working to restore the system in around “34 hours”, which suggests around 6am UK time on Sunday.
Crypto sites have become very attractive targets for hackers because billions of dollars of customer assets are held on exchanges, unlike traditional finance.
Blockchain tracing companies have attributed the Binance hack to TraderTraitor, a group linked to North Korea. The FBI held TraderTraitor responsible for a $1.5 billion theft from crypto exchange Bybit last year, which at the time was the largest hack on record.
Chainalysis said Binance hackers “used automation” to move the stolen funds across the Tron network after they were removed from the exchange.
“While this incident is unprecedented in scale, attacks on exchanges are not new. Every exchange must remain vigilant,” Chainalysis said.
Will Megson, vice president of product at Coinbase, said the company is also making “significant upgrades” to its phone protections “to protect users from scam calls.”
“Scammers often try to stay on the phone while coaching their victims in changing settings,” he said.
Star Xu, chief executive of OKX, a cryptocurrency exchange, said his company “must remain humble, vigilant and constantly question our own security assumptions.”
He said digital asset managers should “establish industry-wide mechanisms for real-time security incident notifications, coordinated monitoring of suspicious funds, and rapid responses to potential attacks.”
They also needed to “strengthen our defenses against emerging AI-based security threats.”
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