After Binance, banking cyberattacks hit France, Taiwan and South Korea

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A common point of these banking cyberattacks is that an external service provider often serves as a gateway. In France, the stolen money even ended up in stablecoins.

Start with the number that makes your head spin. On October 29, attackers emptied around $6.36 billion from Binance wallets on ten blockchains, most of it in around twenty minutes.

The FBI attributes the operation to TraderTraitor, a North Korean unit linked to the Lazarus group. Nearly 3 billion were frozen, including more than 2.3 billion by Tether and Circle according to Reuters.

Six days later, France had its banking version. Crédit Mutuel Arkéa recognized on November 4 an attack “which allowed fraudulent transactions to be carried out”.

The hackers entered through a service provider’s platform. They then used the bank's own account to transfer funds to other establishments. No customer has lost a euro, assures the group.

The rest looks like a crypto hack. Bitquery tracked $126 million in USDC released on November 1 and 2 from accounts opened at Kraken, Crypto.com and OKX to seventeen wallets. On the morning of November 5, around 37 million were still sleeping on Ethereum. ZachXBT estimates the total at more than $133 million, and Arkéa only confirms the order of magnitude. The Paris prosecutor's office has opened an investigation.

In Taiwan, the November 3 banking cyberattack targets Bank SinoPac. Its 418 affected customers had neither opened the application nor initiated a transfer. Yet 427 transfers sent NT$41.76 million to a single account at Taipei Fubon Bank. The loot reached approximately $1.3 million.

The Financial Supervision Commission (FSC) calls into question the security settings of the supplier of the new online banking system, which no other establishment uses. SinoPac refunded everyone the same day and must submit its incident report by November 12. Its general director dismisses the possibility of a swarm of AI agents and speaks of a human hacker who exploited a vulnerability.

In South Korea, the series has been running since the end of September. The Financial Services Commission recorded 40 incidents at 37 financial companies between September 30 and November 3, with approximately 473,000 pieces of data exposed. Banks, insurers, brokers and crypto platforms are on the list, which opens with Shinhan Bank.

Machine-translated from French