An update to my Binance theft post.
What’s new
In a Saturday alert, the FBI confirmed that North Korea’s TraderTraitor (also tracked as Lazarus, Jade Sleet and APT38) stole more than $6 billion from Binance on or about October 29, BleepingComputer reports. That makes official what TRM Labs and Chainalysis had already said.
- The FBI sees the stolen funds being converted mostly to Ethereum, and expects laundering through DeFi and instant swap services
- The FBI, Secret Service and IRS-CI are asking exchanges and other crypto services to block transactions tied to the laundering addresses
- The FBI published 628 addresses: 608 Ethereum, 19 Bitcoin and one Solana
Recap: Binance traced it to a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, and about $6.36 billion moved across ten chains, mostly in 20 minutes.
My take
Same lesson as before: one admin workstation should never be enough to move that kind of money. Separate admin machines, hardware keys, and a human approval step for big withdrawals.
God Bless, and Happy hacking!
