Binance is now sharing more information about the major hack that resulted in $6.3 billion being stolen from the crypto exchange last week.
The cryptocurrency company previously called the incident a “security issue” and a third-party research firm traced the crime back to a nefarious North Korean hacking group.
Now, we know more about the security issue from a recent public statement from Binance detailing what happened. What led to more than $6 billion being stolen? Hackers utilized social engineering tactics on a Binance employee by pretending to interview them for a fake job at another company.
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According to Binance, the company had “detected and prevented” dozens of attacks from North Korean actors throughout 2026. One such attack occurred when a Binance engineer downloaded a malicious Homebrew installer while attempting to install a popular AI coding tool they had found through a search engine. While the Binance team prevented this attack from succeeding, the incident revealed the engineer’s role and the identities of their colleagues on Binance’s wallet infrastructure team to the hackers.
In September, a different Binance engineer was contacted through a job-hunting platform and went through multiple interview rounds for a company that turned out to be nonexistent. After building trust with the engineer, the hacker posing as an employee at the fake company asked the Binance engineer to download an assignment as part of the interview process. This download included malicious code.
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The hacker took control of the Binance engineer’s computer and used it to access the first engineer’s system as well as a third Binance employee’s computer. Days before Halloween, the attacker accessed the third engineer’s computer using credentials stolen from the first engineer to launch the attack that led to the theft of more than $6 billion.
Fake job interview scams have flourished in recent years. This recent Binance hack is just the latest, and perhaps biggest, such incident.
With that said, it is a concerning cybersecurity failure on Binance’s end. Hackers were able to steal billions by essentially compromising a single computer by tricking one employee.
In total, $6.34 billion in digital assets were affected. Binance says $2.85 billion in digital assets have been “frozen or intercepted.”
Binance has said it will “absorb the financial impact” and reimburse its users for the stolen funds.
