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Trouble is brewing for Binance. The cryptocurrency exchange said hackers stole about $6.3 billion in a ‘security incident’ that appears to be the biggest crypto heist in history.
Breaking it down: Binance said it had suspended all deposits and withdrawals and frozen about $3 billion in funds following the apparent hack. The company also said it would cover all losses linked to the incident.
The breach could be the largest cyber incident ever, surpassing the previous publicly known record set by hackers who stole almost $1.5 billion from Bybit in 2025.
Binance said on X, “We are working around the clock and will share a full post-mortem once the investigation is complete. Please rely only on official Binance channels for updates.”
The cause: Binance’s initial investigation suggests the incident may have involved a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to access a service container and submit unauthorised withdrawal transactions.
The company said it had found no evidence of a wallet private key leak.
Who is affected: Binance reportedly has over 300 million registered users across more than 100 countries. There are no official figures for the number of Binance users in India.
The market impact: Bitcoin dropped 3% at the end of the US session and another 3% during Asian trading, falling below $77,000 to its lowest level since September. Other tokens also sold off.
Big picture: earlier this week, Coinbase, another cryptocurrency platform, acknowledged that a security incident involving a third-party vendor had exposed some customer details. However, no funds were compromised.
October has been a particularly difficult month for cybersecurity, with weaknesses exposed in eMudhra’s digital certificates and vulnerabilities identified in PHP. The State Bank of India (SBI) also suffered a security breach that exposed nearly 3,900 customer records.
