The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, by its acronym in English) pointed this Saturday directly at the regime of North Korea as the author of the theft of more than 6,000 million dollars (about 5,300 million euros) on the cryptocurrency exchange platform Binance.
"The FBI has published information indicating that North Korea was responsible for the theft of more than 6 billion dollars in virtual assets from the cryptocurrency exchange platform Binance, around October 29, 2026. The FBI refers to this malicious North Korean cyber activity as "TraderTraitor"," the statement said.
According to the US agency, the members of TraderTraitor —the elite North Korean 'hackers' unit, already pointed out by the FBI as responsible for the attack against Bybit in February 2025— transformed the stolen funds into Ethereum, an open-source network supported by blockchain technology.
The document adds that these funds are expected "to be subsequently laundered through their conversion via DeFi services", an ecosystem of financial applications that operates on cryptocurrency networks without intermediaries, "thus preparing them for subsequent stages of money laundering".
Binance initially described what happened as a "security incident", whose total impact was calculated at more than 5,000 million euros, of which the company would have managed to freeze less than half. After detecting the breach, the platform temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while carrying out the security checks.
A company specialized in cybersecurity had already pointed out at the time that it was the largest 'cyber-heist' ever recorded and linked it to the North Korean elite 'hackers' unit, an attribution that has now been ratified by the Government of the United States.