FBI Blames North Korea for Binance Theft

The FBI said North Korea was responsible for stealing more than $6 billion in virtual assets from Binance, identifying the cyber activity as TraderTraitor. Binance said it had replenished about 90% of affected assets and began reopening withdrawals in phases on Sunday, November 1, after suspending them following the breach. The FBI said the theft occurred on or about October 29. Its alert described investigators observing the stolen assets being converted primarily into Ethereum. The agency said it expected further laundering through decentralized finance platforms and instant-swap services, and urged cryptocurrency businesses and other service providers to block transactions linked to identified addresses. The attribution is the FBI’s assessment. President Donald Trump said investigators were still learning whether North Korea was involved, and that it was not yet known whether the country was responsible. The FBI alert did not name individual perpetrators or establish how the attackers entered Binance’s systems. Binance’s initial account said a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer may have enabled an attacker to enter a service container and submit unauthorized...