How hard is it to recover the $6.3 billion hackers stole from Binance?

October 30, 2026 / 5:05 PM EDT / CBS News

After hackers stole more than $6 billion from Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange said Friday it was working to recover the assets, a multi-pronged process that experts said involves coordinating with law enforcement and tracking the movement of the stolen funds.

"Binance has begun recovering affected assets for users and continues to work with law enforcement, issuers, blockchain intelligence firms and industry partners to trace, freeze and recover additional funds," a Binance spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News.

Ari Redbord, a former federal prosecutor and the global head of policy at TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company tracking the stolen funds, called the heist the "largest bank robbery in human history."

TRM and other security firms attributed the attack to an elite hacking unit linked with North Korea known as "TraderTraitor." The funds were siphoned from internet-connected wallets on Binance's trading platform, Redbord said. The entire operation took roughly 20 minutes, according to Binance.

"The way a cryptocurrency exchange works is basically just like a bank. People put their funds in the bank, and those funds go onto wallets that are controlled by the exchange," Redbord told CBS News.

Original source: https://www.cbsnews.com/moneywatch/