FBI Confirms North Korea’s TraderTraitor Behind $6 Billion Binance Hack, Urges DeFi Blockades
The FBI says North Korea’s TraderTraitor group stole over $6 billion from Binance and is calling on the crypto ecosystem to block hundreds of laundering addresses.
Wow! The FBI announced on Saturday that the notorious North Korean hacking unit TraderTraitor was behind last week’s massive Binance breach.
According to the statement, the group siphoned more than $6 billion from the exchange on Thursday, a figure echoed by multiple analytics services.
TraderTraitor, a subunit of the Lazarus Group, allegedly converted much of the loot into ether, with the FBI noting a conversion value of ETH $2,266.51.
The agency warned that the hackers will likely keep using swap services and other DeFi tools to launder the remaining funds.
FBI, USSS, and IRS‑CI are urging private sector entities including THORNode operators, RPC node operators, instant exchanges, DeFi services, blockchain analytics firms, and other virtual asset service providers to block transactions with or derived from addresses TraderTraitor actors are using to launder these stolen assets, the notice read.
In its Saturday notice, the FBI listed more than 600 Ethereum addresses, just under 20 Bitcoin addresses, and a single Solana address for the community to block.
Stablecoin issuers have already frozen over $2.4 billion of the stolen funds, yet the attackers continue to move the rest.
Binance said it had replenished 90 % of the stolen cryptocurrencies and planned to resume customer withdrawals on Sunday.
Chainalysis CEO Jonathan Levin said the hackers have already employed “thousands of addresses” and expects the network to expand to “tens of thousands” in the coming weeks as money moves through a broader laundering ecosystem.
Levin added that the perpetrators are deploying “novel automated laundering mechanisms” and using automated tools to obscure the trail by rapidly circulating funds between addresses.
U.S. President Donald Trump, when asked about the hack, said “we’re learning about it” and indicated his administration would “talk to North Korea about it.”
This development underscores the scale of the breach and the urgent call for the crypto community to act.
