Rohan Paul

The flow of events > Hackers took over a Binance DevOps engineer’s laptop, which already had access to the exchange’s transaction-approval systems, and used it to make Binance send unauthorised withdrawals from its pooled hot wallets on Solana, Ethereum, Base and Tron, starting at 8.05pm GMT Thursday for 30 minutes, with a second wave after 11pm. > About $6.3B in nearly 200 tokens left the exchange; Circle and Tether froze $2.8B of USDC and USDT, but the attackers had already converted about $3.3B into unfreezable assets such as ETH and are still moving it. > TRM Labs linked the attack to North Korea’s TraderTraitor unit, while Binance found additional breach points beyond the laptop and is still investigating. > Binance says it has reserved $6.34B, $5B of it in the exact stolen tokens, and is buying the rest on the open market to repay users, as knock-on effects begin with Jupiter Earn reporting a withdrawal liquidity crunch.