Binance says $6.34bn hack began with a fake job interview
A fake job interview, a tampered software download and an internal AI tool turned against its own engineers: that is Binance's account of how attackers moved $6.34 billion out of its wallets on 29 October, a campaign the exchange says ran for five months before a single coin left.
In its first public incident report, released alongside a briefing by co-CEO Richard Teng and chief security officer Jimmy Su, Binance said the first foothold came in June, when a wallet DevOps engineer downloaded a tampered installer for a popular AI coding tool. Security staff caught the anomaly and rotated credentials, but the episode exposed the engineer's role and the names of colleagues on the wallet infrastructure team. In September a second engineer was approached on a legitimate job platform by someone posing as a project director, sat a video interview with a purported HR representative and a second with a supposed CEO, and was then sent an "assignment": a code repository to install on his work machine that swapped a legitimate component for a malicious version and opened a channel to an attacker-controlled server. Binance said its endpoint tools did not flag the malware at the time.
On 20 October the attackers used that machine and an internal AI tool to reach two more wallet engineers, one holding a container deployment token. Nine days later they logged into a third engineer's computer and launched the drain. Between 20:05 and 20:09 UTC, five hot wallets sent 233.46 million XRP to an attacker address, followed by about 970,500 SOL and 44.2 million OP, and a hot wallet sent 18,270 BTC. The attacker then used the compromised signing service to invoke Ethereum's EIP-7702, handing an attacker-controlled contract partial control of a Binance hot wallet through 50 signing transactions that sat outside the exchange's withdrawal infrastructure. Because the wallet used multi-party computation, no single key existed to revoke them; the final unauthorised transfer, 2,961.9 ETH, settled at 23:56 UTC and the delegation was cleared at 00:10 UTC on 30 October. "This wasn't one mistake or one breach — it was a months-long campaign," Teng wrote on X. "We're publishing the full report because the lessons go far beyond Binance."
Binance said it has frozen or intercepted about $2.85 billion of the stolen assets and replenished 98% of affected tokens from its own funds, buying the balance on the open market. It said it blocked 57 other suspected North Korea-linked attempts this year using similar lures. The FBI has attributed the attack to North Korea; Binance's report cites that finding but stops short of its own attribution, and Pyongyang rejected the claim on Monday, with Kim Yo Jong, sister of leader Kim Jong Un, calling it a "grave political provocation" through state media. Customers withdrew $10.97 billion in the 46 hours after withdrawals reopened on Sunday, with net outflows of $5.28 billion, according to data Teng shared; by 03:00 UTC hourly deposits exceeded withdrawals, and Binance reopened withdrawals for dozens more assets across nine networks on Tuesday.
The breach has become a talking point in Washington. CFTC chairman Michael Selig said the hack "proves our exact point" about the need for a federal registration path for offshore exchanges, and on Tuesday the agency cleared equity perpetual futures for US-regulated venues. Binance said it has rebuilt the wallet system and the internal AI tool in new environments, replaced affected devices, revoked the engineers' credentials, expanded behavioural anomaly detection and is commissioning an independent review, while planning a research fund on AI security with outside firms. Some technical details, the report says, will stay private.
What it means for Pakistan: For Pakistani users of offshore exchanges, the Binance report is a reminder that the platform holding their funds sits outside any local licensing regime: PVARA's framework for virtual asset service providers is still being built out, and the State Bank's restrictions on crypto trading remain in place, so a Pakistani customer's recourse after an incident of this kind runs through the exchange's own reimbursement policy rather than a domestic regulator. The attack's entry point — a fake recruiter on a legitimate job platform targeting a developer — is also a direct warning to Pakistan's growing pool of remote Web3 and software contractors, who are prime targets for the same lures.
