The Federal Bureau of Investigation stated that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea orchestrated the theft of roughly $6.3 billion worth of digital currency from the Binance crypto exchange on Thursday.
In a press release published on Saturday, the FBI noted in a news release that it classifies this particular North Korean hostile online operation as “TraderTraitor,” and has recently detected it swapping the pilfered funds predominantly into Ether (ETH).
The agency anticipates that these holdings will undergo additional conversions through decentralized finance platforms and rapid swap protocols as the cybercriminals transition into more sophisticated laundering phases.
The FBI strongly advised private sector organizations, such as THORNode operators, RPC node operators, instantaneous trading platforms, DeFi protocols, blockchain intelligence companies, and other cryptocurrency service enterprises, to reject any transfers involving or originating from the wallet addresses deployed by TraderTraitor operatives to sanitize these stolen funds. The official press release includes a comprehensive roster of these addresses.
Cointelegraph previously covered earlier this year that threat actors associated with North Korea accounted for approximately 60% of all funds lost to cryptocurrency breaches in 2025, with the stolen capital utilized to support the government’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile initiatives, emphasizing a mounting dependence on virtual currencies to acquire strong foreign currency.
North Korean defense spending supplemented
Related: Crypto losses from North Korea hackers in 2025 rose 51% YoY: Report
Those findings originated from a study by CertiK which linked over $2 billion out of an anticipated $3.4 billion in total 2025 cryptocurrency security breaches to state-sponsored North Korean cells, spanning 79 out of 656 recorded events that year.
Although Pyongyang fails to release reliable financial records, data from the independent analysis group MilitarySpend suggests that moderate estimates put its true yearly military expenditures at roughly $6 billion, calculated via purchasing-power-adjusted GDP metrics, though this number remains unconfirmed.
MilitarySpend further notes that income generated from military equipment shipments to Russia—calculated by South Korean intelligence at up to $5 billion in ordnance supplied between 2022 and 2025—bolsters local weaponry initiatives alongside digital asset heists, which supply extra unrecorded capital for weapons of mass destruction creation.
As previously covered by Cointelegraph, spanning from 2016 through the early months of 2026, operatives connected to North Korea plundered an evaluated $6.75 billion in digital tokens over 263 recorded breaches, based on data from CertiK referencing discoveries by independent blockchain investigator Taylor Monahan.
The evaluation by CertiK determined that North Korea has systematically transformed cryptocurrency theft into a primary source of government income.
Magazine: Binance hackers raced to move billions before it could be frozen
Originally published at https://cointelegraph.com/news/fbi-blames-north-korea-for-record-63b-binance-hack?utm_source=rss_feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_partner_inbound.
