Hackers Took 6.3 Billion Dollars From Binance in About Twenty Minutes
The biggest crypto theft in history drained 6.3 billion dollars from Binance in roughly twenty minutes. About 3 billion has been frozen, the exchange says it will cover losses, and investigators suspect the same group behind last year record Bybit hack.
The biggest crypto theft ever, at commute speed
Morning Brew reported that hackers stole most of a 6.3 billion dollar haul from Binance in roughly twenty minutes, faster than the average American commute. Binance is the largest digital coin exchange in the world, and no earlier crypto theft comes close to this one. It is four times larger than the then record hack of Bybit last year.
Put another way, this single theft is almost twice as big as all crypto thefts in 2025 combined. The exchange suspended withdrawals until it passes what its co chief executive called rigorous testing, which he said should wrap up sometime this weekend.
Half frozen, half still gone
Binance and its partners have frozen about 3 billion dollars of the stolen assets, which leaves about 3.3 billion dollars still unrecovered. The exchange said it would cover all losses, but it plans to dip into company funds to do it. Its emergency reserve for cyberattacks held only 1.23 billion dollars in bitcoin, and that pile lost value after the hack spooked crypto markets.
As for who did it, Binance said a group of hackers may have broken into an engineer laptop. The FBI is investigating, and blockchain analysts already believe this was the work of the same North Korean hacker group that allegedly targeted Bybit last year. One compromised laptop may have opened the door to the largest theft in crypto history.
Your business has a version of that laptop
Most creators will never guard billions, but the shape of this failure is familiar. A business that films events, edits client work, and holds years of footage usually has one machine, one cloud login, or one person whose account can reach everything. If that single point falls, the whole archive and every client login falls with it.
The fix is boring and cheap compared with the risk. Turn on two factor authentication everywhere, use a password manager with a unique password per account, keep client footage in at least two places, and give team members access only to what their job needs. None of that trends on social media. All of it decides whether a bad day becomes a bad year.
What to check before Monday
Start with the accounts that hold money and client work: email, banking, cloud storage, and your main social profiles. Email matters most, because whoever controls your inbox can reset almost everything else. Change any password you have reused, and save recovery codes somewhere that is not a photo on the same phone.
Then look at who else can log in. Old editors, former helpers, and shared passwords from years ago are the open windows nobody remembers leaving open. Binance is learning what one weak entry point costs at the largest scale. A small business can learn the same lesson this weekend for free.
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