Binance hit by biggest cyber attack, deposits back, withdrawals still paused; $6.3 billion at risk

PTC Web Desk:  Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, is dealing with what could be the biggest cyber attack the industry has seen. The company says assets worth around $6.3 billion may be affected. If that holds, it would be far bigger than the Bybit theft of nearly $1.5 billion in 2025, which was the largest known case so far.

On Friday, Binance said deposits are working normally again. Withdrawals are still on hold while its team rebuilds the security of the withdrawal system and the addresses linked to it. The exchange expects to restart them within 48 hours. It also said the attack had more than one cause and that a full report on the root cause will follow.

How did the attack happen?

Binance’s early findings point to the laptop of a DevOps engineer. The company believes the device was compromised, which let the attacker reach a service container and send withdrawal requests that nobody had approved. Investigators are now following the whole path of the attack, starting from that machine. Binance stressed that it has found no sign that any wallet private keys were leaked and no sign that hackers got into individual user wallets.

Money frozen and losses covered

Binance says it worked with blockchain partners to freeze a large chunk of the stolen assets, about $3 billion so far. Tether’s chief executive, Paolo Ardoino, said his company froze roughly $1.55 billion to $1.6 billion in tokens linked to the incident. Circle’s chief, Jeremy Allaire, said it had frozen over $800 million.

Binance has promised to cover every loss from its SAFU fund and its own money. SAFU was created in 2018 as an emergency reserve for users and usually holds around $1 billion. The exchange will also publish a fresh Proof of Reserves once repairs are done.

As first steps, it paused deposits and withdrawals, cancelled the authorisation of the affected address and brought in law enforcement and blockchain intelligence firms to trace the funds and identify the attackers.

Who is affected?

That is still unclear. Binance has over 300 million registered users in more than 100 countries, but it has not said how many were hit. Binance US says it is not affected. There are no official numbers for Binance users in India.

Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, founded Binance in 2017. He stepped back from running it in 2023 under a settlement with US authorities but remains a major shareholder. He first assured users their funds were safe and later wrote that it does look like a hack.

Market reaction

Bitcoin dropped between 3.2 and 5 per cent and at one point slipped under $77,000. Ethereum and Solana also fell.

A rough few days for crypto and cybersecurity

Elsewhere, Polymarket briefly stopped trading after one of its third-party providers was compromised and said affected users would be made whole. Earlier this week, Coinbase admitted that a breach at an outside vendor exposed some customer details, though no funds were taken.

October has been bad for security more widely. Issues came to light involving eMudhra’s digital certificates and PHP vulnerabilities and a breach at State Bank of India exposed nearly 3,900 customer records.

Binance says it will keep posting updates on its official channels and has asked users to rely only on those.

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