Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, lost an estimated $6.3 billion in digital assets in a cyberattack Thursday, the biggest theft the crypto industry has ever recorded and a blow that rattled markets and renewed questions about how even the best-funded platforms protect customer money.

The exchange suspended deposits and withdrawals while it works with law enforcement to secure its systems and track the stolen funds, and said about $3 billion of the crypto has been identified and frozen. Binance has pledged to cover all losses.

"The estimated total impact sits at around $6.3B," Binance said in a post on X late Thursday.

The theft dwarfs the previous record. Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs said the haul is roughly four times the $1.5 billion stolen from rival exchange Bybit in February 2025.

Binance has not yet published a full root cause, and investigators say the picture is still developing. But company statements and independent blockchain analysis point to five factors that allowed the attack to succeed.

1. A single compromised laptop opened the door

Binance's own early findings point to a familiar weak spot: a person's computer.

Binance said an attacker appears to have used a DevOps engineer's compromised laptop to reach a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.

Co-CEO Richard Teng said the company's initial review indicated "this security incident may have started with a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop."

DevOps engineers typically manage the software systems that keep a platform running, which can give their machines privileged access to sensitive internal infrastructure. Security experts have long warned that such employees are high-value targets for........

© International Business Times